WhatsApp takes so long to implement basic features that all of its competitors has that I’m convinced that its codebase is a horror show and breaks every convention there is, and every features requires a full rewrite of a core part of the service.
I’d argue Facebook messenger is the IE of messaging apps. It’s worse than WhatsApp in possibly every way, and it’s the main form of communication in my country.
It’s bad at link previews. For example, if someone sends a YouTube link you won’t get a preview thumbnail of the YouTube video. This is weird, because I’m sure this worked before (although not every time). I think this should be basic functionality in modern messaging apps.
Terrible photo quality, especially from Android devices. I noted that the image quality of photos from Android users were significantly worse. Like, you can visibly see all the terrible jpeg artifacts. Haven’t seen this to the same extent on other messaging apps.
The link preview thing whatsapp use this weird way of handling it. The preview has to be loaded on the sender end first, then the receiver will get it. If the link was sent before preview was loaded, then the receiver just getting plain ol blue text.
On any other messenger, imessage, discord, etc. the clients try to load the preview on the receiver end. Simpler and work so much better.
Curious what you use instead? Been looking for something that’s convenient to use, full resolution pictures and videos, desktop apps, etc. Sadly, WhatsApp is currently my leading choice with this news.
Family currently uses Google Chat and it’s pretty terrible. Buggy on iPhone and no desktop app.
Signal is a great alternative to WhatsApp. Images sent aren’t going to be full quality and will go through some compression of course, but the final sent picture is still going to be leaps and bounds over the garbage that WhatsApp sends. When going through old pictures on my camera roll, I can instantly tell what was sent/saved over WhatsApp compared to Signal due to just how pixelated it gets.
