> Sharing metadata with Facebook will be WhatsApp's undoing, mark my words.

It pains me to say this, but almost nobody cares. Many people don't even know that Facebook owns WhatsApp. Most people don't care about how privacy-intrusive Messenger (or whatever Facebook's chat app is called nowadays) is, and WhatsApp is less intrusive than that (at least the data is e2e encrypted). I don't see any undoing in sight, unless the competition steps its game up a whole lot.

> I don't see any undoing in sight, unless the competition steps its game up a whole lot.

Due to network effects, competitors can't really have a big impact on reducing WhatsApp usage unless something scandalous and hugely worrisome (to the general public) happens with WhatsApp, which then causes many people to ditch it.

I don't use WhatsApp because it's owned by Facebook. So my following comments here should be taken with a pinch of salt. Telegram, which I do use, has been on a rapid pace of development for at least a few years now. If I had to guess, I'd say that Telegram likely provides a much faster, better and richer experience compared to WhatsApp. Just a few features that come to my mind on Telegram that I like and value - username (no need to reveal one's phone number to others), @replies to tag users, cross platform/OS and cross device sync, great search (global as well as within a conversation), and message editing and deletion after sending. Telegram also has bots, money transfer and other features. I'm aware of the comparative security related weaknesses in Telegram, but other ones (like Signal and Wire, more so Signal) that are better on the security front have a long way to go to catch up with Telegram on reliability, features and UX.

Telegram has become more and more popular in my network, and part of what makes it work is that for the most part it doesn't really complicate things too much to use both WhatsApp and Telegram. It's not ideal, but largely frictionless.

The one issue I have with Telegram is that starting at least six months ago there can be a huge delay in message delivery. Sometimes easily half an hour after a message was sent. Does anyone else have this experience?

Only thing I can think of other than Telegram just getting worse in this regard is that perhaps they 'punished' me because I've been experimenting with bots. It's almost enough to make me stop using it though, as push (or near-instant) message delivery is rather important...

> The one issue I have with Telegram is that starting at least six months ago there can be a huge delay in message delivery. Sometimes easily half an hour after a message was sent. Does anyone else have this experience?

I haven't experienced such long delays with Telegram. It takes a few seconds, though I will admit that message delivery seems to have slowed down compared to how it was a few years ago.

Stories + Camera + Pictures is all Zuck. (Global Facebook theme: "Take pictures, tell stories, connect with real people.")

Otherwise the comm's platform will just degenerate into shitposting, memes, and politics. Make it easier / more natural to share "real" pictures, not meme-y text.

You'll see it "universally" in all their apps... each done slightly differently to account for differing user-base habits, but the core idea is the same... suck oxygen from competitors, and push forward with tools for OC and not reposts (original content, aka: real-user-sharing).

> "Status"? No one cares.

I really didn't care either. Then we went on a family vacation and instead of sending pictures to everybody all the time, I put a couple on my status every other day and told people if they're interested, they can look there.

I must admit it was a fun experience watching people check them out (you can see who looks at your status) and a few fun conversations started through it. Definitely a better option than firehose blasting everybody with your vacation pictures directly. (Hardly anybody in even my extended family uses facebook, btw.)

As for swiping left: That's just the alternative mode for tab switching, swiping right gets you to "status". I agree that it doesn't need a camera tab, though.

why not provide link to Google photos shared album?

The social aspects are huge in Asia. How important is it that you can send an audio message instead of text to you? Again, probably not at all. In China, it was the single differentiating feature that led to Wechat's rise. My preferences does not integrate into our preferences.

And Stories, what was he thinking?

Oh, that's an easy one. They want to get some of Snapchat's market share.

WhatsApp's UI is a complete mess. Trying to explain it to my mum has been near-impossible.

Starting a new conversation is done with an unlabeled FAB on the main-screen. She had no idea that that was even a button.

Then there's four tabs across the top. One for taking pictures, because the Camera-App and the camera-shortcut in the conversation view apparently weren't enough, one for actual chats, one for setting your status, because that's clearly a similar action to chatting and should therefore be placed in a tab next to it, and one for calls, no idea why that's not just a button in the contacts list.

Then when you go into the conversation view, at the bottom you have a generic attach media icon, a take-picture-and-send-it-shortcut and then separate from that the send-voice-message button, sharing its place with the actual send-message button. That might've been clever design at some point in the past, but now you have those other buttons right next to the send-voice-message button, so it should share the look with those as it does a very similar thing.

Also, the unlabeled movie-camera-icon at the top does not mean sending a video, it means starting a video call. You could sort of guess that by the location of that button, but that's still not just obvious, especially not for my mum.

Where you can however now send videos from, is the Emoji-selector. Or well, it's rather GIFs. Reaction-GIFs, even. Which is why I'm not completely opposed to them having placed it there instead of in the attach-media-dialog, but now you have 9 tabs at the top of the Emoji-selector and three tabs at the bottom (also including the search), as well as a delete-key, which does not behave like a tab. And two of these tabs even share the same icon.

Moving on, when you mark a message for selection, you get 5 icons at the top. Two of those are the exact same arrow-icon just mirrored. One means "Reply", the other means "Forward". Even knowing that there's a difference, I couldn't tell you which one means which without first long-pressing on them, which my mum won't know to do.

Also, one of those 5 icons is a star and when you long-press on it, it literally says "Star". Not "Favourite", not "Remind me", not "Mark as Important". I don't even know what it does myself, so I can't tell you what it should say there.

Some of these problems are hard to avoid or hard to get right, but many of these are there, because they absolutely did not focus on being a chat application and instead had to turn the whole thing into everything and the kitchen sink, and then they're even making the individual features compete for a spot in the directly visible GUI, no matter how much it clutters things up, just because they want people to use them.

All of those things are pretty minor and employ fairly standard design patterns. I think you're exaggerating a bit here.

The app is quite streamlined, especially compared to other apps like Facebook Messenger or Skype. I think if you were to remove any of the main features at this point, people would complain and jump ship to another app.

why you dont install to your parents Signal? that's what i did, extremely simple UI, but still knows even SMS, video and voice calls, it's gotta be easiest messenger out there full of features