Whatsapp is the Internet Explorer of the messaging apps, change my mind.
And it sucks that is the main form of communication in my country
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.
From top of my head:
- 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.
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.
These are the messenger apps I typically recommend:
- Session @session
- SimpleX @simplex
- Threema @threemaapp
Signal is also a reasonable alternative to WhatsApp, but their poor decisions have forced me to stop recommending their app.
Still better than FB Messenger, that’s really popular among the youth where I live.
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 mean… Couldn’t you always just send them as a file when image quality mattered?
Yes, but people rarely do that, they just hit the send photo button. I had to be the annoying person asking people to send them again
It’s a bit complicated process. I’ve to tell people how to do that all the time.
This would be great.
They should also focus on reducing and optimizing background usage. App is a wakelock fest.
I guess this is one of the features that’s soon only available to WhatsApp Plus subscribers
