WhatsApp offers a neat tool called Disappearing messages that can automatically delete your chats after a set period. One caveat of this feature is that the setting applies to the entire chat, instead of some specific messages, which may not be ideal for everyone's uses — every once in a while, you might want to save a disappearing message for future use. WhatsApp now looks to be working on a tool to do exactly that, saving your phone’s gallery from filling up with screenshots of old chats.
The messaging app has been testing the keep messages feature for close to a year now, but for some reason, it hasn’t yet made it to the stable release. When first appearing in early 2022, we saw a couple of options to “Keep” and “Unkeep” an ephemeral message. WhatsApp even added a quick way to access these saved messages from the chat window itself. But it now appears that WhatsApp is gearing up to deploy the feature more widely.
WABetaInfo spotted the “Kept messages” option on the profile info page in a recent beta. This is where you'll find all the disappearing messages that you've saved. Everyone involved in that particular chat (like in a group) will be able to see this section to access these messages, but that continued access also means that anyone can still manually delete them.
The feature has appeared for some Android users running the latest beta version of both WhatsApp and WhatsApp Business. You can attempt to try it for yourself by downloading the WhatsApp beta from the Play Store or APK Mirror, but access appears limit on an account-by-account basis for the moment.
In the current stable version of WhatsApp, there is no option to save a disappearing message just yet. Hopefully this time, WhatsApp will bring the ability to everyone in the coming weeks, and not keep us waiting for another few months.