Lots of people use WhatsApp. It seems to be the most popular way of communicating in the Western world. But I find it to be one of the most user unfriendly apps out there, so I wrote this short rant about all the things I don’t like about WhatsApp.
Contacts
I still haven’t gotten my head around how to manage my contacts. Every time I have to find the option inside the profile settings and pull out a QR code in order to add someone. Why is it so hidden? Can’t there just be an “Add Contact” button on the main page?
Then there is no real option to view your contacts. You have to start a new conversation in order to see a contacts list. After that there’s very little in the way of contact management. It’s the most stripped down and user-unfriendly contact management UI I’ve seen in any social media app.
It’s so bad that third parties sell tools for better contact management with WhatsApp. Of course, only business owners interested in using WhatsApp as their main communication tool would pay for something like this, so the rest of us are left having to deal with the inferior UI.
Backups
The backups never work. I’ve been forced to change my phone and my number a few times. There’s supposed to be a backup/restore system in place to help with this. It has failed every single time. I’m not the only one – a quick Google search reveals that many others have had problems with backup not working.
The effect of this isn’t just lost conversations. You lose contacts and access to every single group you’ve been a part of. I’ve been forced to message friends on other social media apps just to recover these contacts and groups. There are many I’ll never get back. It always sucks to lose contact with someone. You form a bond with someone or a group of people and now you’ll never see where those relationships could have gone.
Having a backup/restore feature is good in theory, but if it’s poorly implemented in practice, it can generate a lot of opportunities for clickbait articles.
Media
WhatsApp automatically saves media to your gallery. You can turn this feature off, but then it won’t let you view any media until you click. Then it saves the media to your gallery anyway. What. The. Fuck?
This is the most annoying feature that WhatsApp has. In an age with cloud backups and limited server space, you don’t want your backup galleries filled with crap from social media or messenger apps, unless you explicitly choose to save it, of course.
Some people ask how you expect to see an image or video if it isn’t downloaded. I get that it needs to be downloaded, but it doesn’t need to be saved to your Gallery.
Some people say it’s an issue with Android. Some people say that all social media apps do this. Yet I don’t find my Gallery cluttered with images from Instagram every time I open the app. In fact, I have used many social media apps on Android, so I’m answering these arguments with this handy dandy chart:
Does the App Automatically Save Images to the Gallery?
| YES | NO |
| Messenger | |
| Bluesky | |
| Mastadon | |
| Signal | |
| Pixelfed | |
| tumblr | |
There are workarounds involving privacy settings, or manually adding a file to the WhatsApp folder on your phone, but these are involve technical skills that the average user likely won’t understand. Why WhatsApp is the only app that can’t figure out how to handle images sensibly is beyond my understanding.
Security
While images saving to the Gallery is the most annoying thing about WhatsApp, this is the most serious problem with WhatsApp. WhatsApp claims to be end-to-end encrypted (E2EE), but that encryption is closed source. It has been revealed that there is an AI scanning messages that, under the right circumstances, can be sent to moderation in plaintext, which makes me question the veracity of the claim of E2EE. This is an explicit backdoor, one which could easily be adapted for more nefarious goals.
Outside of this, only the messages are encrypted when they are sent. Metadata is not. This means that who you are talking to, when you send/recieve messages, when you mark messages as read, and so on are among the vulnerable data. This metadata is worth money to data harvesting companies, though there is no evidence I can find that Facebook is explicitly selling this specific dataset.
The other concern is that WhatsApp is part of the Meta ecosystem, and given that Mark Zuckerberg is pretty much sucking up to Trump at every given opportunity, this is a real concern. It is essentially a fascist messaging app at this point. Some people might find that last statement controversial, but for me and many others it is a genuine concern.
And if boycotting Nazis is not a reason to stop supporting WhatsApp, I don’t know what is.
Rant Over
So what do you think? Am I wrong? Is there something about WhatsApp that I’m missing? Or do you have any other gripes about WhatsApp that I haven’t talked about here?
Let me know in the comments below!
