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Comment by remus | Hacker News Reader

Out of interest what do you not like about the whatsapp app? The core functionality seems pretty solid to me.

I meet someone. I want to send them a WhatsApp message. I should be able to type their number into the “To” field, type the message, and press “Send”. Instead, WhatsApp makes me create a new contact in my phone, going through the 4-5 button presses to do that. Then I can start a chat with this new contact. Massively inconvenient.

You can send a message without saving their contact, as long as you have their number.

https://wa.me/their-number-with-the-country-code

Paste this link(after putting their number) in a chat with yourself (https://wa.me/your-number-with-the-country-code) and just click the link.

That is a way but its obviously not encouraged or it'd be a built in feature. Sending yourself a message with a custom URL isn't exactly amazing UX.

> or it'd be a built in feature

It is a built in feature. People can generate wa.me URLs for their account in settings.

That is a domain owned by WhatsApp. It's not some unofficial service.

I mean in the sense you can just enter a phone number and hit "Start Chat". The URL feature is so you can embed it in your social profiles or whatever and people can message you from there. It's just really hacky to use it as a method of initiating a chat if it's not already a link you can just click on.

If you refuse to upload your entire phonebook to Meta, the app will HATE you for it. You will not be able to initiate any chats, the other party needs to start chatting you first. Also, instead of names, only phone numbers will be shown. (I cope by looking at avatars and inferring identity from the previous few messages.)

This would all be easily fixable. You could be able to start a chat by entering (or, more realistically, copy-pasting) a phone number. And instead of a phone number, you could be shown the other person's profile name (like in Telegram).

That it binds to your cell phone number, and that I can't run the web client on an Android tablet (at least the last time I tried).

Lack of granular settings for notifications, wonky integration with the desktop client, groups, your id is your phone number.

There isn't much that's wrong per se, but when compared to e.g. Telegram it's much worse.

There are very good reasons why your I'd is your phone number

There may be good reasons why your ID can be your phone number but I've never heard a good reason why your ID must be your phone number. Do you have any?

It majorly cuts down on spam, by a huge amount.

Is that a thing?

Outside of SMS, I only use Skype, Slack and Whatsapp for instant messaging, and in terms of spam, SMS, which is bound to my number, gets the most spam, which is already quite rare.

> when compared to e.g. Telegram it's much worse

To be fair Telegram, privacy and security concerns aside, is a pretty high bar. Surely Facebook has the resources to make an exceptional app, but apparently they don't think it'd be worth it for them. I really wish something like Matrix had clients as good as Telegram's!

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