WhatsApp sucks. Message delivery/notifications are unreliable, the interface is hideous, it lacks the Tapback/reaction feature which is heavily used in iMessage, and it dumps pics from group chats into your photo library automatically, as if you took them yourself. Idiot posts racist meme to a group chat? It lives in your photos library forever until you notice and manually delete.
Notifications being sporadically (at best) delivered is the real deal breaker for me.
What’s more fun than a party you missed because WhatsApp didn’t feel like delivering notifications for a day?
1. Settings → Chats → Disable "Save to Camera Roll", done.
2. WhatsApp has rock-solid message delivery, otherwise it wouldn't have 2 billion users (https://blog.whatsapp.com/two-billion-users-connecting-the-w...). It's the default messaging app in most of the world. You don't become that popular with unreliable message delivery.
Notifications only seem to work if WhatsApp is actively running, unlike every other app on the iPhone.
I checked again, and yup, a bunch of messages in a group chat I never was notified for.
That behavior is fine if it’s your primary app, but it sucks if you’re not constantly checking.
Also, 2 is a bad thought in general. Consider: “Windows has a billion+ users, of course it doesn’t crash. You don’t get 1 billion+ users with bsod and forced updates.”
Your comparison to Windows is probably more appropriate than you think. When is the last time Windows crashed on you (and it wasn't a dodgy third-party driver that caused it)? It works fine for nearly everyone using it. So does WhatsApp.
The US is a big place. WhatsApp has plenty of users in the US. It’s easily the third messaging app I use, after LINE and iMessage. And the people I talk to on WhatsApp are US natives, it’s not like they picked up WhatsApp in some other country and brought it here.
If you're using three messaging apps on a regular basis, you are either an extreme outlier or have lots of contact with people who are in other countries or have strong ties to other countries.
One thing I have come to appreciate about WhatsApp is its ability to handle low bandwidth environments better than iMessage. Back in 2015, I was traveling around Europe and had T-Mobile's unlimited roaming plan. I think the data speed was capped at like 64 or 128kbps? In addition, many hostels had less than 1Mbps wifi. iMessage would just choke trying to send pictures or large messages. In particular, it would be stuck in the middle of that "sending" blue line indefinitely like it was quietly timing out and would sometimes require a reboot of the phone to recover because it would remain stuck in the "sending" phase forever. Whatsapp seemed better tested and more solid when it came to transmitting messages. You'd see consistent progressing updates in the progress bar until it either timed out(unlikely) or finally transmitted.
