WhatsApp on iOS cripples user experience without access to OS contact list. You cannot create groups, and cannot initiate a chat with anyone, even by phone number. It works if someone else messages you first or adds you to a group.
> cannot initiate a chat with anyone, even by phone number
as stated before, i can initiate convo by number just fine. it's just that i can't edit the identifier/handle and so it's always shown by number. thankfully most ppl have set their profile pic public, but it gets messy pretty fast.
Well I’ll be darned. They must have changed that recently or I didn’t update WhatsApp for a while, it definitely used to lead to a non-ideal state screen fairly recently. Props for the pointer!
For people as confused as I was about the above link - after spending 5 minutes trying to figure out why visiting it gives me a 404 page, I eventually got out my phone and tried pushing that link to Android activity system, and then I discovered: it's meant to be wa.me/[an actual phone number goes here] - like wa.me/12345678912345.
If you type https://wa.me/your_own_phone_number (replace your_own_phone_number with your number) you can get into a chat with yourself. Useful for misanthropes, introverts, or for having a place to store information.
Because WhatsApp has a sound e2e implementation enabled by default, is more trustworthy than Telegram and less liable to be influenced by Russian government? Keeping contacts out of it is just hygienic.
As far as I can tell, on Android, whatsapp requires adding a person to your contacts before you can message them at all. I find this very annoying when I'm going to be messaging someone for a brief period only. If there's a way to not do this, I'd like to know it.
You can start a chat with yourself in whatsapp, to send these links to yourself and easily click on them. (type wa.me/your-phone-number-in-international-format , click and send any message )
Thanks, I'll remember that. It's an awkward workaround compared to pasting their number from an email into the app, but it'll have to do I guess.
Here it's pretty common for people to, for example, put a notice up in my apartment foyer "does anyone have xyz that I can borrow, please app me at +123456789" and having to create a contact is an annoying bit of overhead.
* telegram uses an "internal" contact list for which one can add contacts via the desktop client and then works as expected.
* whatsapp let's the user freely initiate contact by phone numbers, but then only shows the number (no name).
don't know about signal.