If your business is sucking people's attention, and harvesting people's private information so you can target them better, mobile is a much easier way to do it.
Plus there's a generation of product managers who just dismiss the desktop or web as old/arcane/niche and uncool anyways.
It's also not surprising coming from the Instagram backround -- which was a mobile only app for years (well, because it was based on stuff you did with your phone camera, so it made sense). But even Facebook these days is repeatedly broken on the web in ways it never used to be. Notifications go missing, or don't come in in the background, state goes stale, things never load, or require a full site reload to resolve... bugs in the web version that have gone unfixed for literally years. This is not an organization that prioritizes the web, at this point, despite having its origin there. I don't think WhatsApp has ever had anything beyond a barebones web experience.
I was surprised by how many seemed to not even notice or remark on this being the case, tho. I knew mobile was the primary modality by which people interacted these days, but I guess it didn't really sink in for me to what degree: people don't even notice the absence of a desktop computer way of using the thing.
Myself, well, I thought about trying out Threads -- I have Instagram and Facebook accounts anyways -- but I couldn't be bothered with anything that is mobile-only. On a typical day I only pick up my phone to do 2FA sign-ins.
And yes, I know you can view people's posts/threads via web, but that's it.
Plus there's a generation of product managers who just dismiss the desktop or web as old/arcane/niche and uncool anyways.
It's also not surprising coming from the Instagram backround -- which was a mobile only app for years (well, because it was based on stuff you did with your phone camera, so it made sense). But even Facebook these days is repeatedly broken on the web in ways it never used to be. Notifications go missing, or don't come in in the background, state goes stale, things never load, or require a full site reload to resolve... bugs in the web version that have gone unfixed for literally years. This is not an organization that prioritizes the web, at this point, despite having its origin there. I don't think WhatsApp has ever had anything beyond a barebones web experience.
I was surprised by how many seemed to not even notice or remark on this being the case, tho. I knew mobile was the primary modality by which people interacted these days, but I guess it didn't really sink in for me to what degree: people don't even notice the absence of a desktop computer way of using the thing.
Myself, well, I thought about trying out Threads -- I have Instagram and Facebook accounts anyways -- but I couldn't be bothered with anything that is mobile-only. On a typical day I only pick up my phone to do 2FA sign-ins.
And yes, I know you can view people's posts/threads via web, but that's it.