Whatsapp is the Internet Explorer of the messaging apps, change my mind.
And it sucks that is the main form of communication in my country
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
304 points (92.2% liked)
Technology
60127 readers
3105 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I’d argue Facebook messenger is the IE of messaging apps. It’s worse than WhatsApp in possibly every way, and it’s the main form of communication in my country.
in my country too. and whats irritating is that most businesses and government services use it too . instead of, you know, improving their websites?
pulls the mask off both apps
Facebook again!
Really?
That sucks for sure, gladly everyone here doesn't use it at all, I think I have only talked through there to business supports and stuff like that.
Why it's worse?
From top of my head:
- It’s bad at link previews. For example, if someone sends a YouTube link you won’t get a preview thumbnail of the YouTube video. This is weird, because I’m sure this worked before (although not every time). I think this should be basic functionality in modern messaging apps.
- Terrible photo quality, especially from Android devices. I noted that the image quality of photos from Android users were significantly worse. Like, you can visibly see all the terrible jpeg artifacts. Haven’t seen this to the same extent on other messaging apps.
The link preview thing whatsapp use this weird way of handling it. The preview has to be loaded on the sender end first, then the receiver will get it. If the link was sent before preview was loaded, then the receiver just getting plain ol blue text.
On any other messenger, imessage, discord, etc. the clients try to load the preview on the receiver end. Simpler and work so much better.
Thanks for response
SMS and MMS are the IE of the messaging world.
For sure.
Same. It sucks, but everyone is using it. Can't not use it either, as work demands it too.
Curious what you use instead? Been looking for something that’s convenient to use, full resolution pictures and videos, desktop apps, etc. Sadly, WhatsApp is currently my leading choice with this news.
Family currently uses Google Chat and it’s pretty terrible. Buggy on iPhone and no desktop app.
How about Signal?
Signal is a great alternative to WhatsApp. Images sent aren't going to be full quality and will go through some compression of course, but the final sent picture is still going to be leaps and bounds over the garbage that WhatsApp sends. When going through old pictures on my camera roll, I can instantly tell what was sent/saved over WhatsApp compared to Signal due to just how pixelated it gets.
I use Telegram, and I have heard some nice things about Signal.
Brazilian?
Mexican.
Still better than FB Messenger, that's really popular among the youth where I live.
The only thing that FB Messenger as a Messenger app has is the name lol.
👀🍿Oop
WhatsApp takes so long to implement basic features that all of its competitors has that I'm convinced that its codebase is a horror show and breaks every convention there is, and every features requires a full rewrite of a core part of the service.
yet the wide masses use it, idk why.
It arrived first
I mean... Couldn't you always just send them as a file when image quality mattered?
Yes, but people rarely do that, they just hit the send photo button. I had to be the annoying person asking people to send them again
Also there's a default option enabled that limits resolution even more when not on wifi
I never thought about that..
It's a bit complicated process. I've to tell people how to do that all the time.
Yeah people don't understand what I mean when I ask them to send it as a file.
This would be great.
They should also focus on reducing and optimizing background usage. App is a wakelock fest.
I guess this is one of the features that's soon only available to WhatsApp Plus subscribers