The new editing functionality in Android Messages is interesting. I wondered what happens if you edit a message to contain nothing. The answer is it won't let you save the edit if it contains nothing.

So then I tried editing it to just a space, but that didn't work either. Then I went down a list of various Unicode spaces. None worked

Except for one. When you edit a message to contain just that Unicode space, the message just plain disappears.

However, if you use the new "delete for everyone" functionality, it leaves a tombstone where th message used to be.

So if you want to delete without a tombstone, use the zero width non-breaking space. Poof, it's gone.