- user accessible backups. WhatsApp backs up to your Google Drive account but you can't access it directly. Only WhatsApp may do that (f_ck you Google for contributing to WhatsApp's lock-in). Local backups are encrypted so you can't read them. Exports are incomplete (for example, on one chat it would give me the last month or so when I could scroll back more than a year). WhatsApp discards old messages at its discretion without letting you configure otherwise. I lost a ton of very important texts from the last months of my now-deceased mother. I f_cking had to scrape what was left from WhatsApp Web.

- open protocol and open source clients and servers, with network working independent of any particular provider to be able to ditch any misbehaving one.

- no expiration on software versions. Why are we being forced to update versions to view old messages?

Damn is software becoming user hostile.