Not "recently". Disappearing messages have been there for at least 5 or 5 years.

Almost _all_ my Signal chats are on 1 week or 1 day disappearing settings. It helps to remind everyone to grab useful info out of the chat (for example, stick dinner plan times/dates/locations into a calendar) rather than hoping everybody on the chat remembers to delete messages intended to be ephemeral.

The "$person set disappearing messages to 5 minutes" has become shorthand for "juicy tidbit that's not to be repeated" amongst quite a few of my circl3es of friends. Even in face to face discussion, someone will occasionally say something like "bigiain has set disappearing messages to five minutes" as a joke/gag way of saying what used to be expressed as "Don't tell anyone, but..."

(I just looked it up, https://signal.org/blog/disappearing-messages/ from Oct 2016.)

Maybe it was only added recently on the desktop client.

Keep in mind that any time a message is on flash storage there might be a hidden copy kept for flash technical reasons. It is hard to get to (particularly if the disk is encrypted) but might still be accessible in some cases.

I think encrypted messengers should have a "completely off the record" mode that can easily be switched on and off. Such a mode would guarantee that your messages are never stored anywhere that might become permanent. When you switch it off then everything is wiped from memory. That might be a good time to ensure any keys associated with a forward secrecy scheme are wiped as well.

And a screenshot, or another camera, or a rooted phone can easily defeat that.

The analog hole ALWAYS exists. Pretending it doesnt is ridiculous.

> And a screenshot, or another camera, or a rooted phone can easily defeat that.

Not if the message has already been deleted. Auto-deleting messages are so the recipient doesn't have to delete them manually, not so the recipient can't possibly keep a copy.

Exactly this. Even more: Auto-deleting messages are also that the sender doesn't have to delete them manually. Most people do not understand this. I even had a discussion with an open source chat app implementer who insisted on not implementing disappearing messages because they couldn't be really enforced.

That's a different threat model, no messaging app is trying to protect the sender from the receiver. Disappearing messages are meant to protect two parties communicating with each other against a 3rd party who would eventually gain access to the device and its data.

Wickr has a "screenshot notification to sender" feature (which of course, can be worked around by taking a pic of the screen without Wickr knowing you've done it).

What made you think I was pretending it doesn't?