Whatsapp sucks these days.

[scaramoosh]

The whole reason I used Whatsapp is so I have have an old phone and not get distracted. I used to go on holiday with KaiOS and it meant I still had a messaging app, but I concentrated on the holiday and not the internet. However Whatsapp dropped support for KaiOS the other year, so I was using a Qin AI Life or whatever it's called, it's a simple dumb phone type thing that runs Android. However I've never connected it to anything and uninstalled it all and disabled Google services and all that. I've been using it for years fine with Whatsapp and today I get a messaging say it's out of date and stopped working. Totally arbitrary for them to do that, when people can get Linux running on 30 year old hardware and keep it all up to date :/

The whole point of Whatsapp was to bridge all these old devices together with modern ones and be OS agnostic. Why even bother using it anymore if you need a modern Android phone or iPhone? They have great messaging apps built in, I've never needed it on my iPhone as everyone uses iMessage.

Now there are no options out there, KaiOS is dead, everything else is dead..... You need modern Android or modern IOS. Entering a world with less and less choice, where the internet is heavily policed (in the UK at least) and you'll be tracked everywhere.

 

[The-Real-Deal82]

A lot of people I know use iPhone too but WhatsApp is still the primary messaging platform in the UK and other parts of Europe, as we just realise not everyone will necessarily be using an iPhone. Its also a lot better at handling group chats than iMessage I would say. What do you mean tracked in the UK?

 

[HouseLannister]

Never used KaiOS. In another life, I worked cell phone and ISP tech support for a few years. In addition to Android and iOS, I dealt with Windows Mobile 6.x, Windows Phone 7, webOS, Blackberry 10, and various Symbian and Tizen devices and such. Choices definitely were popping up all over the place. It was wild. It was a lot. It couldn't last. Tech support people hated dealing with all these OSes. There was no way they could actually use them all, so they were working off crappy support articles that lacked pictures and were never updated. So the solution to every problem seemed to be reset the device to factory default and if the problem persists, get a new phone. Needless to say, I hated this job and left for greener pastures.

But I still wish there was at least a third big player, as the current duopoly is not ideal. Even Android, with all its choices, has fewer options each year. No more LG. No more HTC. No more Nokia. Microsoft and Blackberry stopped their Android phones. ASUS just said they are not doing any new phones in 2026.

The whole point of Whatsapp was...

Unfortunately, it doesn't matter what the point "was." It's owned by Meta now, so the point "is" to make Meta money. I am sure they view older devices as holding them back from finding new ways to monetize and therefore destroy the platform. I don't know much about their tech stack though. Currently, most of their revenue is made from businesses paying for API access to launch chats from links and such, right? But I am sure they want to turn up the dial as the years go by and find more ways to make profit.

 

[Hank001]

Why don't you use SMS? It's great. It almost always delivers. It works on all phones, on any OS. Usually free too, or at the very least you'll get 150 SMS per month. You'll also don't get distracted from emoji's, from links, from attachments, from pictures, video... the lot.