I think this perhaps sums up my feeling about this whole topic; which is that YMMV.
My world is divided into 2 spheres, personal and work. My personal world runs on WhatsApp. But then in my country everyone has WhatsApp. Nobody uses SMS (other than for spam and OTP), nobody cares about this week's offering from Google or Apple.
Voice calls, group chats, polls (invaluable for group decisions) DMs, etc.
I don't negate uour experience of it. Clearly it failed for you. But the nature of a thread like this is that it's all just personal experience, which is, not surprisingly all over the map.
i noticed about people who like WhatsApp are mostly one of these groups (or combination):
1. They don’t know any better
2. Their expectations low (anything better than sms is already good enough)
3. They see “everyone is using it in my country” as the main feature
4. They are very light users (they don’t need cross device synchronization, they don’t do business or live inside a messenger for work, they don’t care about extra latency, clumsy ui, resiliency, backups etc).
Of course, and that's a meaningful advantage. My point is that product itself can be terrible while its marketing and distribution is near perfect. Some sort of monopoly dynamics I suppose.
My world is divided into 2 spheres, personal and work. My personal world runs on WhatsApp. But then in my country everyone has WhatsApp. Nobody uses SMS (other than for spam and OTP), nobody cares about this week's offering from Google or Apple.
Voice calls, group chats, polls (invaluable for group decisions) DMs, etc.
I don't negate uour experience of it. Clearly it failed for you. But the nature of a thread like this is that it's all just personal experience, which is, not surprisingly all over the map.