WhatsApp has quietly had a disappearing message setting for a while now, but it's seemingly going to get a bit easier to access thanks to an upcoming change.

The setting has long been buried in individual chats, letting you switch on the setting so that messages delete after a certain period of time, but there was no way to make this change universally across all your chats.

That's seemingly going to change, per a report from WABetaInfo, which has uncovered details of the new system. It's going to add a toggle to the main settings page for your WhatsApp app on both iOS and Android.

This toggle will let you apply the disappearing function to all your current chats, but will also automatically apply it to any new chats you start so that you don't have to keep remembering to seek out the setting. It might be a small change, but it's a welcome one that'll make it easier to manage things. 

There's no word on exactly when the change is intended to take place, or indeed official confirmation that it actually is indeed coming, but we'd anticipate that it isn't too far away from going live.