
Tell HN: Please dont brick the app - sitepodmatt
An old friend of mine died of cancer on Sunday, alone in a Thai government hospital, with no family or friends around him, in a language he didn&#x27;t really understand, it sad ending, it was not a dignified way to go.<p>His only contact with the others in world in recent months has been WhatsApp which I setup when I visited him earlier in the year. He had expected to live several months but things took a turn for the worse and rapidly deteriorated over a few days. WhatsApp the buggers put an arbitrary time limit on the app between updates so he was locked out - confused and desperate (coupled with the morphine), I guess he had enough mentally.<p>I presume his phone was never updating due to storage being near limit - tbf his phone was a mess and he was a technophobe, and since he never saved contacts just sent off the number I guess there was no record of his contacts in his main phone. I have in phone in my possession now, but my new number was not there for example, he had tried to call my old number via non Internet on the 8th. I&#x27;ve managed to sort out the hospital, the death certificates, family wishes, and temple send off, but I&#x27;m sure he would not of wanted to leave things in this way.<p>App devs - We&#x27;re not all in 1st world countries surrounded by friends and family, with techies to troubleshoot. Please don&#x27;t brick your communication apps on a time limit, maybe disable emoji or video calls or some non core functionality, but lets not go nuts and block the whole app for the sake of adding telemetry, ads, or more politically correct emojis. This wasn&#x27;t a protocol change or anything else afaik which makes me quite angry. <i>end of rant</i>
======
ivm
> We're not all in 1st world countries surrounded by friends and family, with
> techies to troubleshoot

I was recently helping local veterinarians to clean their computers. It was so
bad that they were switching between two machines when one of them was
freezing.

Yes, their computers are old but they don't have a budget to buy new ones.
Memory and CPU aren't cheap when you are not a middle-class citizen of a rich
country. Bloated and bugged software with poor UX design seriously affects
people's lives, prevents them from doing their important jobs.

Please, strive for quality. We are engineers – others depend on our creations.

------
pesfandiar
Sorry about your loss.

While I understand how frustrating it was to lose use of the app in a delicate
situation like that, I can see why developers would do that. A business has to
pay for maintaining compatibility over many versions (engineering time,
complexity, ...), and with free consumer apps like WhatsApp, it makes business
sense to bug users to update or disable altogether.

As a consumer, I hope such empathy for users catches on though. The emergence
of UX designers and now accessibility experts has made software more
empathetic, so who knows, maybe there will be pressure to stop forced updates.

------
cttet
Especially when I know that WhatsApp system is built in ErlangVM, which is
famous for its ability to maintain being functional across updates..

~~~
captn3m0
The client (assuming Android) is not in erlang. From what I've seen, WhatsApp
actually tries its best to keep old clients running as long as possible, and
they only stop working for critical functional updates.

There were Symbian phones which kept running WhatsApp till very recently.

------
tarboreus
Hear hear. If software engineers are truly engineers, there needs to be
redundancy and graceful fallbacks.

