Sometimes, instead of seeing WhatsApp messages from a chat, what appears to you is a message from Waiting for message. It may take time. Is a bug that can sometimes be fixed and others, unfortunately, no.
If you encountered the error of Waiting for message… on WhatsApp and you don’t know exactly why, we tell you reason for this message and what you can do to try to recover messages that you cannot read.
Why do I get this error message
All WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encryption, which means that even if they are intercepted, no one can read their content. Nobody except the two people who have the “special key”: the one who sent it and the one who received it.
Each device with WhatsApp is associated with a private key, which is used to decrypt messages. In the app itself, you can verify a chat’s security by checking security keys and scanning a QR code: if they match on both mobiles, the chat is encrypted
WhatsApp encryption scheme
These encryption keys are to blame for the message Waiting for message. It can take time in a chat. Basically that means that the message could not be decrypted for some reasons. The reasons why this happens are mainly two:
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Has anyone reinstalled whatsapp. You or the other person reinstalled WhatsApp. Even if the same mobile and the same phone number are used, the encryption key changes and therefore it is not used to decrypt messages that have been “pending”.
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The other person has not been connected to the Internet for a long time. Another possible reason is that this message was sent to you a long time ago and this person has not logged into WhatsApp for a long time, so the key needs to be renewed.
In either case, the error will apply to messages that were left “in limbo” when the password was changed, not old messages that, for example, you restore from a WhatsApp backup.
With the arrival of the new WhatsApp multi-device mode, which works independently of the mobile, there is another way to get this error: if you reinstall WhatsApp on the mobile but you are still using the account on WhatsApp Web or for PC
Another Similar WhatsApp Error
This error is similar, but different from Waiting for message. Look at your phonewhich may appear on WhatsApp Web when someone you don’t know writes to you and/or if WhatsApp Web needs time to decrypt messages.
In this case, one way to force the decryption of the message is open whatsapp on mobile. If that doesn’t fix the problem, the same solutions below may also help you with this error.
What can you do to fix this error
The issue occurs when the encryption key of one of the partners changes unexpectedly. Without it, WhatsApp cannot decrypt the message.
As the error states, “it may take a while”, though sometimes the wait will be forever. If the keys have changed, there will be no way for your mobile to be able to decrypt the messages. The only thing you can do in this case is ask the other person to forward messages to youbecause on your mobile they must be decrypted.
The WhatsApp Help Center also recommends keeping WhatsApp updated to a recent version, and if the cause is that the other person hasn’t connected to the internet for a long time, you’ll have to wait for them to do so. This is all you can do about:
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Ask the other person to forward messages to you. If he has decrypted them on his mobile, he can resend them to you.
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Ask the other person to open WhatsApp. If the reason is that the other person has not logged into WhatsApp for a long time, this will update the keys.
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update whatsapp. This shouldn’t affect much since encryption has been in WhatsApp for years, but it never hurts if you and the other person have a current version of the app.
