In an ideal world, I'd like both. Mandated interoperability would help a great deal—but I also don't believe Facebook should ever have been allowed to buy Whatsapp, and it's worth undoing that.
No password access, login through SMS which can be intercepted, no 2FA, no access from another device while you phone is dead, compresses video to 2 pixels, no real crypto auth to speak of.
It does not seem to have any features that are better than Signal, telegram, messenger, or a dozen other apps. Why is it worth any awards or special consideration, besides being popular?
You're not wrong about any of this, but that final phrase weighs far more for most people than anything else. It is a communications app after all, and is only useful if there are people to communicate with.
I posted this elsewhere but I think Ben Thompson gives a very deep analysis of the issues in the competitive landscape here:
https://stratechery.com/2017/manifestos-and-monopolies/
The summary would be something like "any acquisition of a social network by another social network is necessarily anticompetitive and should be banned, or at least have the presumption of being illegal".
The only way that there can be a true competitor to Facebook is for a smaller social network like Instagram, or WhatsApp, or TikTok, to not get acquired and to grow until their userbase is bigger.
Zuckerberg understands this well; you can read his emails where he openly admits that buying Instagram is about preempting a competitor:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagr...
The money quote from Zuckerberg:
"There are network effects around social products and a finite number of different social mechanics to invent. Once someone wins at a specific mechanic, it’s difficult for others to supplant them without doing something different.”
“One way of looking at this is that what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitors springs up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again. Within that time, if we incorporate the social mechanics they were using, those new products won’t get much traction since we’ll already have their mechanics deployed at scale.”
I think you can apply the same argument to WhatsApp; by purchasing a rival social network, they prevent it from being a competitive threat.
End-to-end encryption in a proprietary app is a joke. "Please trust us we encrypt your messages".
But it was pretty good before they bought it, too. And widely used, IIRC was clearly the biggest in some parts of the world.
In short, their implementation allows to change the encryption keys of users without their consent to arbitrary, known keys. The protocol won't re-encrypt sent messages, but there is nothing in the protocol forcing the app to show a notification that your encryption key has changed, which amounts to a man-in-the-middle attack. Any subsequent messages sent or received using that encryption key will be exposed to the attacker.
Encryption keys are managed on servers controlled by WhatsApp.
Disclaimer: I personally know nothing about beyond the posts in this thread.
Did you click through the link at all?
It's curious that you are using a new account with a gibberish name to make all these claims.