How do you know who you can message with it if the app can’t check who has it?
Do you, every time you want to message someone, manually copy in their number? For every person you communicate with?
What if they previously didn’t have WhatsApp installed, but have since installed, so you also need to check again every time you want to message someone who formerly didn’t have WhatsApp.
That’s not going to work for people.
> What if they previously didn’t have WhatsApp installed, but have since installed, so you also need to check again every time you want to message someone who formerly didn’t have WhatsApp.
Why is this important? I use WhatsApp instead of SMS for contacts who don't have (free) SMS or who want the extra security. It's pretty intentional. Why would I want to use WhatsApp with everyone? That concept seems aligned with Facebook's goals, not mine.
Because WhatsApp (and other messengers) offer a far superior messaging experience to SMS: higher fidelity media, on time delivery, delivery status, e2e, and many more. Better experience means that people actually use it.
As you say, for “extra security”. But not everyone arrived at the decision of “how much security” they need at the same moment in time. People come to and leave the WA platform, and it’s desirable for me to know where people are at now so I can use e2e in new places as opposed to only with the subset of my social graph that I manually copied and pasted in which had installed WA before me.
I don’t deny that you like your setup, but it sounds pretty painful and pretty unlikely to appeal to a broad swathe of people, which is essential when trying to combat mass surveillance.
(is mass surveillance why you jump through these hoops?)
WhatsApp by comparison was practically free. So it is not even about superior messaging experience, it also comes down to cost.
That's the thing: people (non-tech, non-privacy aware) are always trading privacy for convenience.
You ask them via other means? It might be slightly inconvenient, yes, but you almost make it sound like even SMS is an impossible task; SMS is not even that old and none of the millions who used it before there were even apps to do so had much of the problems you mention. Also because not everyone has a usecase requiring to know who has what app.
I run WhatsApp on an Android instance with an account solely for that, so no contacts etc, and literally all my contacts/groups in WhatsApp are people who at one point told 'let's do this via whatsapp'. Then again, I don't need to message people I don't know with it so I don't have any problems.
Do you, every time you want to message someone, manually copy in their number? For every person you communicate with?
No, just once, or else they send me a message and we're talking.
tldr; ok I'm not 'most people' in this regard, but still I think you're making things look way harder then they actually are
Even if you never touched Google/Facebook in your life, they have your number and many other data about you via other persons
Even if you never touched an Apple device in your life, they already have done Facial Recognition on you because your friends took a photo of you and tagged you (see the creepy HomeKit doorbells that recognise you despite you have never agreed to facial recognition)
Laws totally fail to address that aspect of Privacy
Within seconds of installing, I received a telegram from a co-worker who jokingly said: "For privacy reasons, when you install Telegram, it sends a message to all of your contacts."
It simply creates your virtual contact list from the contact lists of your contacts.