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WhatsApp Testing Apple Watch App

Rob__Mac said:
I really like going out without my phone sometimes, but if I'm meeting friends who don't have iMessage, I have to ask them to call me if they need me. Really put me off using my watch alone for longer periods. Really pleased to see this is finally coming.
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I’d like to have it on the watch as an autonomous App as well, but unfortunately the article says the Apple Watch App needs to be connected to an iPhone to work (so basically it sounds like a nice Bluetooth remote countrol for the iPhone App).
 
ipedro said:
Why? What's Europe's fascination with WhatsApp? I don't get it. RCS is now fully rolled out and multiplatform. People who know better should start new conversations in their default messages app so their family and friends start to realize that WhatsApp isn't necessary. Why would people want to run all their personal and business communications through META of all companies?
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There's no fascination. Once a messaging system becomes widespread it's difficult avoid using it, or you end up cutting yourself off from conversations and groups.
When Whatsapp was way behind Telegram in terms of features and security, I tried to convince my friends and contacts to install Telegram. Virtually nobody did it. Today I could ask people to rather use Signal (Telegram's owner is probably even worse than Zuckerberg), but who would do it? There's no advantage in fragmentation. I find myself switching from Telegram to Whatsapp depending on the people I'm messaging to. Creating a common chat is impossible, actually, there's only one solution: using Whatsapp which everybody has.

Of course SMS/RCS is universal and works on every device, but iMessage is not.
And Apple certainly is guilty of segregating people as well

 
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bob24 said:
I don't really like WhatsApp myself and I would rather use the native iOS message App, but I’d say there are 2 main reasons:

1) RCS isn’t actually fully rolled-out globally by any means. In a majority of countries in the world (including many European countries) there is either no support or partial support only from some mobile networks. Meaning RCS isn’t currently fit for purpose to message contacts within the country and actually has worse reach to message international contacts than WhatsApp currently offers. See here a list off RCS-supported carriers/countries on iOS and you will see it really is a small minority and really not universal (plus as I understand not all RCS implementations are interoperable and for example a RCS user in Japan can't chat with an RCS user in the US): https://foxt.dev/ios-rcs/

2) Apple decided to sacrifice SMS and iMessage in Europe (and most of the world) to WhatsApp in the name of the “blue bubble” marketing in the US. I.e. while the blue bubble discussions and deliberate lack of RCS support on iOS for a long time (to push for iMessage and messaging fragmentation between iOS and Android in North America) was getting them more iPhone sales due to peer pressure in the US, this strategy didn’t really work in most of the world but instead helped WhatsApp become the de-facto messaging App in many countries. This is because while in the US people were OK to use SMS/MMS as a backup to contact Android users, most of the rest of the world didn’t want to settle for the rather limited feature set of this option and turned to Meta and WhatsApp instead (which was offering communications features Apple didn’t with iMessage and SMS/MMS: free international messaging, reliable group messaging, easy media sharing, and free international group calls, all across iOS and Android devices which is very important in most of the world). This has effectively made WhatsApp the default messenging App in a majority of countries in the world, and it is very hard to kill this network effect (even if I don’t like WhatsApp, I have no choice but to use it because this is what everyone uses where I live and the first criteria for how good a messaging App is is whether the people you want to contact can be reached with it).

So in short: for US users, migrating to RCS is a seamless transition which feels like an improvement in terms of features vs what they had before, while for most of the world it means moving to another App, losing your chat history, not being sure all your contacts will be available, and without any obvious gain in terms of features (actually losing the free international group video calls WhatsApp is offering). Again I don’t really like Meta’s privacy practices and the clunky WhatsApp UI, but all the things I mentioned mean RCS isn’t an easy sell in WhatsApp dominated countries.
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It’s almost as if cross-platform messaging is a solved problem making RCS completely redundant 😂
 
mrochester said:
It’s almost as if cross-platform messaging is a solved problem making RCS completely redundant 😂
Click to expand...

Actually from a technical standpoint jabber/XMPP solved this problem better than RCS and a long time ago, but it was unfortunately killed by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple who all wanted to promote their respective proprietary IM solutions and created the fragmented mess we currently have.

But yeah while I would definitely prefer messenging to rely on an open and decentralised protocol which lets you chose your client and is interoperable with anyone else (similarity to emails), RCS is actually old and not so great technology, which can be seen from the limited feature set and slow rollout vs other competing options. And in spite of being proprietary (which I don’t particularly like), WhatsApp has indeed already solved the same problem RCS does (and more) for most people in the world, and a majority of those people don’t care about the technical details and whether it is proprietary as long as it works for them).

So while I would prefer for an open protocol to replace WhatsApp, I don’t think RCS in its current form is one that can do it.
 
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So now I'm waiting for YouTube Music REAL app to happen and my "minimum list" will be fulfilled :D
 
This was a nice surprise to wake up to this morning. Finally !! I know it shouldn’t have , but those hod damn blurry photos really grated !!

For a first beta it’s very nice indeed. The entire UI seems straight forward & surprisingly polished. I’m sure it will continue to be worked on & improved with every TestFlight beta.

I’ve noticed that sending a Voice note can be buggy. Listening to one is fine , but for me on my Ultra 3 , when I go to send a VN there’s a random 10 seconds countdown & as soon as the 10 seconds have elapsed it stops recording.

Another “ feature “ they need to add asap is a watch complication designed for the small or large position. It’s a watch app after all , so there needs to a complication for you to get straight into the app , rather than selecting settings on the watch & scrolling to find. Then moving on from that , a notification badge/count needs to be overlayed on this complication so you can see at a glance how many WhatsApp’s you have unread.

I know I’m wanting to run before I can walk & hopefully WhatsApp have this planned for the future.

Cheers
 
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Yes please! It’s nice we can reply from the notification since iOS 9 and that worked for watch too, but it’s annoying when you want to send a message and Siri can’t do it neither.
 
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Well, at last!
Some watches that already have WhatApp,
  • Samsung Galaxy Watch 4, 5, 6 series
  • Google Pixel Watch and Pixel Watch 2
  • Fossil Gen 6 and newer
  • TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra and TicWatch 5 Pro
  • Montblanc Summit 3
  • TAG Heuer Connected Calibre E4
  • Xiaomi Mi Watch 2 Pro
  • Huawei Watch GT 3, GT 4, Watch 4 Pro
  • Xiaomi Watch S3, Redmi Watch 4
  • LEMFO LEM16
  • Kospet Prime 2
  • Zeblaze Thor 6
  • Rogbid Brave Pro
Watches that run WearOS, HarmonyOS, HyperOS...
Oppo Watch 3, OnePlus Watch 2 ...
 
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I really hope this new app will allow incoming WhatsApp calls to be notified on the watch in the same exact way it already happens for the regular phone calls, so with a vibration as well.
 
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mrochester said:
RCS would need to have features that aren’t available on WhatsApp to draw people away from WhatsApp. As it stands, RCS has fewer features than WhatsApp.

This is why I have always said RCS is pointless as cross-platform messaging has long been a solved problem.

Also, RCS is not available on Vodafone in the UK for iOS so it’s definitely not fully rolled out.
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FWIW I'm UK based and don't have Whatsapp, never used it. Most of my comms goes through iMessage or SMS. I know that a lot of the 'older' (35+) demo love it, but I've never had a situation where i've needed to install it. It's definitely popular, don't get me wrong.
 
I hope it allows us to change from the default notification sound/vibration to something more like iMessage's two-tap 🤞. I had to turn off WA notification mirroring on my watch because e.g. 3 photos in a row shakes my wrist off.
 
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orsev said:
FWIW I'm UK based and don't have Whatsapp, never used it. Most of my comms goes through iMessage or SMS. I know that a lot of the 'older' (35+) demo love it, but I've never had a situation where i've needed to install it. It's definitely popular, don't get me wrong.
Click to expand...

Out of curiosity, you don’t tend to have group chats with Android users? (Which wouldn’t be covered by iMessage or SMS, and from what I can see Android has a larger market share than iOS in the UK)
 
apparatchik said:
OMG, this is huge, SMS / Text / iMessages are not a thing in most of the world, so having the messages app in the watch was meaningless, Whatsapp, OTOH, would give the cellular Apple Watch just enough functionality to make it viable for going out and leaving the phone at home on occasions.

Hope they do release it, I would be switching back to a cellular Apple Watch if this is the case.
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Sorry silly question but will they launch standalone app. I hope they won’t just create an app on watch which still requires phone nearby…
 
bob24 said:
Out of curiosity, you don’t tend to have group chats with Android users? (Which wouldn’t be covered by iMessage or SMS, and from what I can see Android has a larger market share than iOS in the UK)
Click to expand...
Nobody in my family, nor my friendship group has an android (at least as their primary device)! I understand this does not represent everyone in the UK by any means but where I am based most users you see have iPhones. For the odd case where I need to contact someone that doesn’t SMS/RCS does the job. We have a modified version of matrix with a web app / app for communication at work that covers that base, but off the top of my head I think one person at my company of 30 ish has a Galaxy. I have a wider ‘group chat’ that sits in discord server we have used for the past 5 odd years as well.
 
I have just started to use WhatsApp, since I have family and friends in Europe. So, this app might be a nice add. Now, if only WhatsApp would offer "Send later".

You know, we're not all on the same time zones all over the world...
 
JoeSilver said:
There's no fascination. Once a messaging system becomes widespread it's difficult avoid using it, or you end up cutting yourself off from conversations and groups.
When Whatsapp was way behind Telegram in terms of features and security, I tried to convince my friends and contacts to install Telegram. Virtually nobody did it. Today I could ask people to rather use Signal (Telegram's owner is probably even worse than Zuckerberg), but who would do it? There's no advantage in fragmentation. I find myself switching from Telegram to Whatsapp depending on the people I'm messaging to. Creating a common chat is impossible, actually, there's only one solution: using Whatsapp which everybody has.

Of course SMS/RCS is universal and works on every device, but iMessage is not.
And Apple certainly is guilty of segregating people as well

Click to expand...
One issue I feel with 'moving' away from iMessage, is not having text/sms messages deliver to my Mac, iPad, etcetera. If that DID work, I would turn off iMessage...
 
circatee said:
One issue I feel with 'moving' away from iMessage, is not having text/sms messages deliver to my Mac, iPad, etcetera. If that DID work, I would turn off iMessage...
Click to expand...
Whatsapp has a native app for Mac, iPad, iPhone, but of course, the price is fragmentation.
 
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