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Comment by improv32 | Hacker News Reader

iMessage has read receipts, faster and more reliable delivery, higher quality images/videos. More than just the color of the bubble

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Looks like you have never used Whatsapp!

Comparing against SMS. Nearly every messaging platform other than SMS has that feature set.

In the US, nobody uses WhatsApp, so it’s not a realistic option. Network effects are a thing.

The US is a big place. WhatsApp has plenty of users in the US. It’s easily the third messaging app I use, after LINE and iMessage. And the people I talk to on WhatsApp are US natives, it’s not like they picked up WhatsApp in some other country and brought it here.

LINE? Really? I have yet to see anyone use that unless it is to talk to friends in Japan or Korea.

We use it for the stickers.

If you're using three messaging apps on a regular basis, you are either an extreme outlier or have lots of contact with people who are in other countries or have strong ties to other countries.

> Network effects are a thing

Exactly. These are social products. Features are meaningless if you can’t talk to the people you want to reach.

There's a lot of people who use WhatsApp even in the US. Perhaps not as many as iMessage, but it's still a household name.

Do they use them to talk to people in the US who have no connection to countries where it is the main messaging app?

In some cases?

If your snark needs another snarky reply, it would be this:

“Looks like you have never used Telegram.”

This game can go on and on, but WhatsApp is nowhere close to being the best messaging app feature wise.

One thing I have come to appreciate about WhatsApp is its ability to handle low bandwidth environments better than iMessage. Back in 2015, I was traveling around Europe and had T-Mobile's unlimited roaming plan. I think the data speed was capped at like 64 or 128kbps? In addition, many hostels had less than 1Mbps wifi. iMessage would just choke trying to send pictures or large messages. In particular, it would be stuck in the middle of that "sending" blue line indefinitely like it was quietly timing out and would sometimes require a reboot of the phone to recover because it would remain stuck in the "sending" phase forever. Whatsapp seemed better tested and more solid when it came to transmitting messages. You'd see consistent progressing updates in the progress bar until it either timed out(unlikely) or finally transmitted.

Can’t send Live Photo’s. They get converted to regular or a crappy gif.

WhatsApp sucks. Message delivery/notifications are unreliable, the interface is hideous, it lacks the Tapback/reaction feature which is heavily used in iMessage, and it dumps pics from group chats into your photo library automatically, as if you took them yourself. Idiot posts racist meme to a group chat? It lives in your photos library forever until you notice and manually delete.

Notifications being sporadically (at best) delivered is the real deal breaker for me.

What’s more fun than a party you missed because WhatsApp didn’t feel like delivering notifications for a day?

> the interface is hideous

I always thought WhatsApp did a fairly decent job at feeling native like iMessage? I haven’t used it much, so I’m curious what you don’t like.

1. Settings → Chats → Disable "Save to Camera Roll", done.

2. WhatsApp has rock-solid message delivery, otherwise it wouldn't have 2 billion users (https://blog.whatsapp.com/two-billion-users-connecting-the-w...). It's the default messaging app in most of the world. You don't become that popular with unreliable message delivery.

Notifications only seem to work if WhatsApp is actively running, unlike every other app on the iPhone.

I checked again, and yup, a bunch of messages in a group chat I never was notified for.

That behavior is fine if it’s your primary app, but it sucks if you’re not constantly checking.

Also, 2 is a bad thought in general. Consider: “Windows has a billion+ users, of course it doesn’t crash. You don’t get 1 billion+ users with bsod and forced updates.”

Have you given WhatsApp notification permissions?

Your comparison to Windows is probably more appropriate than you think. When is the last time Windows crashed on you (and it wasn't a dodgy third-party driver that caused it)? It works fine for nearly everyone using it. So does WhatsApp.

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