A potential animation for Twitter’s long-rumored “undo send” feature has been discovered by app researcher Jane Manchun Wong, giving us our best look yet at how it might work.
The interface shows Twitter’s familiar “Your Tweet was sent” dialog above a new “Undo” button. The undo button doubles as a progress bar, which appears to show you how long you have to undo a tweet before it gets sent. Gmail offers a similar option for emails, where it provides a short window to stop messages from being sent after clicking the “Send” button.
“Undo send” has been a rumored part of a paid Twitter subscription tier after it was first mentioned in a user survey last year. It might not be the “edit button” that Twitter users have been requesting forever (and which will probably never happen), but it would still offer users the ability to quickly stop a tweet from posting if they spot a last second typo or Bad Take.
Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that Twitter is exploring paid subscriptions as a way to reduce its reliance on advertising revenue in response to competition from Facebook and Snapchat. The subscriptions could include access to features like “undo send” and profile customization options, it said. Bloomberg also reported that Twitter was exploring ways for users to pay one another for exclusive content, a feature the company later announced as Super Follows.
Jane Manchun Wong is an app researcher who digs through code to find unreleased and unannounced features. Last year she was among the first to spot Twitter’s Birdwatch initiative to allow users to root out misinformation on its service, and she also spotted Twitter’s overhaul of its verification system prior to its official announcement.