81–90 of 262 posts
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It requires a phone number and a smartphone. Not just a phone number.
Weren't there lots of featurephones with whatsapp in the past? And that helped a lot with getting widely deployed? It seems to be available on cheap feature phones now anyway: https://www.gizbot.com/mobile/features/fnord-047499.html
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I’ve never understood the appeal of WhatsApp: it requires a phone number (so it’s useless or hard to setup abroad, and it’s tied to a very personal data), handle very poorly wifi connection (somehow it seems to only update when connected over 4G) and force me to download pictures and videos to see them, trashing my photo folder in the process. It also has no killer features in comparison to any existing messaging app…
You can change the setting for photos not be saved to your camera roll. And in my experience whatsapp has the best connectivity.
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I’ve never understood the appeal of WhatsApp: it requires a phone number (so it’s useless or hard to setup abroad, and it’s tied to a very personal data), handle very poorly wifi connection (somehow it seems to only update when connected over 4G) and force me to download pictures and videos to see them, trashing my photo folder in the process. It also has no killer features in comparison to any existing messaging app…
I got my first smart phone around 2011. In 2011 I was a student in university and I had friends in my circle from Erasmus so they kept their phone number from their own country. In 2011 it wasn’t even free for me to send a sms to people from my own country so I couldn’t even imagine sending sms to people internationally even though they were physically in the same city as me. Well one day a friend told me to download…
Frequent flyers weren't particularly enthusiastic
"It appears that this requires the other party to also have the app installed, right?"
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-technology/952359-tho...
Generally I'm for stronger data protection, but German officials relationship to WhatsApp is a bit silly, I always wonder what their conrete worry or attack scenario is. That a rouge employee at WhatsApp can see your metadata or access your telefone book? That the US government can see your metadata? Criminal and state actors have access to most of that information anyway.
WhatsApp is a proprietary app and Facebook did plan to implement client-side agents that would extract info from content, or blacklist it. This means Facebook has the capability of backdooring WhatsApp and by extension the US government has this capability. This isn't just about the metadata, you would be naive to think so. Proprietary apps, especially those that get automatically updated, will always have this looph…
I would say most applications that goverment offices in Germany use to interact with citizens are proprietary. For example Outlook as a mail client. SAP is used in some administrations. Many cities and police departments have presences on Facebook and Twitter and communicate with people there. Nobody has any issue with using proprietary SMS apps or iMessage.
In fact, open source in administration is currently so rare that it is newsworthy.
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Those were not simple, seamless, cross-platform, drop-in replacements to SMS though, which is what OP was referring to by “text messaging.” Sure, clunky systems which had no chance of mass adoption existed before.
They were if you're willing to overlook the requirement -- which WhatsApp shares -- for the other person to use the same app. (Well, protocol. Gaim handled AIM and MSN fine.) The only thing SMS offered was that the other person didn't need to be running anything. WhatsApp didn't offer that, and also didn't improve on the other messengers of the day.
Essentially, 95% of the reasons WhatsApp was successful were things you glossed over here.
Same messaging experience for everyone (including emojis), great desktop app, easy backup & restore as you switch phones, was early on the reply-swipe functionality, easy forwarding, voice messages, . No, none of these are "killer" features, but it's honestly one of the purest examples of 'Just Works'(TM) I can think of in my digital ecosystem.
SMS on Android is pretty crap, and it's a particularly shitty experience communicating with an iPhone user or in groups.
Every time an article about Whatsapp on HN or Reddit pops up I fearfully look to see if there are legitimate privacy concerns. Afaict, all my messages are still E2E encrypted, and all my stuff is saved to my Google Drive.
Unless you're in a sheltered circle of only iPhones (probably in America), Whatsapp is the best choice by miles IMO. (Edit: sure if Apple would democratize iMessage for x-platform I'd consider it, but given that will never ever happy, Whatsapp is the great equaliser)
No other messaging app has the reach and consistency. And yea, this is a hill I'm willing to die on.
Generally I'm for stronger data protection, but German officials relationship to WhatsApp is a bit silly, I always wonder what their conrete worry or attack scenario is. That a rouge employee at WhatsApp can see your metadata or access your telefone book? That the US government can see your metadata? Criminal and state actors have access to most of that information anyway.
> German officials relationship to WhatsApp is a bit silly, I find HN hivemind relationship to these apps quite silly. A government should never entrust any information to a third party it has zero control over. An individual consumer and a government employee working with classified information have vastly different responsibilities. > I always wonder what their conrete worry or attack scenario is The security of th…
You're right when it comes to government officials working with classified information. But otherwise its completely normal to subcontract IT to third parties, even (especially) in the US.
Let's hope that Germany and other EU countries, including EU institutions adopt or at least consider Matrix, like French did. https://matrix.org/blog/2018/04/26/matrix-and-riot-confirmed...
And they did, what governments do, they failed... https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/19/security-flaw-in-french-go...
> Tchap wasn’t built from scratch. The DINSIC, France’s government agency in charge of all things digital, forked an open-source project called Riot, which is based on an open-source protocol called Matrix.
Generally I'm for stronger data protection, but German officials relationship to WhatsApp is a bit silly, I always wonder what their conrete worry or attack scenario is. That a rouge employee at WhatsApp can see your metadata or access your telefone book? That the US government can see your metadata? Criminal and state actors have access to most of that information anyway.
Already the fact that you are talking to a psychologist is worth a lot to insurances and job candidate assessment platforms. Or to a midwife. Pregnant women are worth a lot in the adtech industry because especially if it's their first baby, they are about to buy lots of things they haven't bought before. Classical example is diapers. This is from the metadata alone. But Whatsapp goes further: it also encourages Googl…
What's the bigger danger for most people? - You talk about pregnancy on WhatsApp, and they - illegally - extract this information so that some website can show you diaper ads? (I'm not even considering the possibility that this information would leak to an employer or heathcare - because such a leak, or anybody doing anything with that info would be considered completely outrageous here.) - Or: your phone breaks and you loose extremely important information stored in chats - passwords, photos, and so on?
For most normal people I know, #2 is the greater hazard. So I , too, would encourage them to back up their stuff in the cloud.
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900 INR https://www.gadgetsnow.com/tech-news/Indias-cheapest-Android... And there's a fair choice for under 1500INR Now sure you can get a non-whatsapp phone for half that price, but it's pretty cheap
Not having whatsapp is a feature, not a bug.