WhatsApp is an increasingly complex app. Along the way, it has lost what we valued most: simplicity

WhatsApp, that application… I have a love-hate relationship with WhatsApp. On the one hand, I find it essential in my day to day, since it is the app I use to talk with my friends and family, share photos and make occasional video calls. On the other hand, I feel that it bothers me. I feel like it’s an app that aspires to be everything and that, in the end, it’s filled with things that just make the experience difficult.

And it is that rare is the week that a novelty that is being tested in the beta is not published and that, in the long run, reaches the stable version. Rare is the month that WhatsApp does not receive any news. In other words, an application whose ultimate goal is to enable fast communication between people it has become more and more complex.

Messages to Communities and States

Surely few know that WhatsApp was devised as an app to publish updates in the mobile Contacts app. The typical “I’m on a call” or “at work”. Soon after, in June 2009, with the launch of push notifications on iOS (WhatsApp was created because Jan Koum, one of its founders, bought an iPhone), and after realizing that users were using the app to send notifications simple to your contacts, the app ended up turning to a messaging system.

This caused the downloads of the app to skyrocket and it was possible to obtain financing to launch the app on other operating systems, such as Symbian, Android, Windows Phone or BlackBerry. By 2011, WhatsApp was already one of the 20 most popular apps on the US App Store. By December 2013, it already had 400 million users. It was a simple, simple messaging app and that made it popular. People bring more people and the rest, as they say, is history. Today WhatsApp is the most used app to communicate, with the permission of certain local apps in certain countries, such as WeChat in China.

The fact is that, since the acquisition by Facebook, now Meta, WhatsApp has been turning to a more social platform. the voice callsvideo calls, the ability to share files, web platforms, but also States (following the success of Instagram stories and the Snapchat format), macrogroups, the business version (which is how WhatsApp monetizes), group video calls and Communities (groups of groups).

What used to be a simple application to send messages and communicate, today has changed to a social app in which we can send messages, yes, but also upload ephemeral photos of our vacations, being in a community of our block of neighbors with different thematic groups, participating in large groups, ordering an empanada from the neighborhood store and, in some countries , even send money.

Little by little, WhatsApp has become more and more complete and complex, both. It is true that there have been welcome news, such as surveys (blessed for the moment) or the possibility of having the same WhatsApp account on several mobile phones (announced just a few days ago), but there are also things that, although they can enrich the experience for some users, they are also excessively complicated for many others. And there is no choice.

Let’s say you only want to use WhatsApp to send messages and photos to your friends. Well, you will also have to see a blue dot because there is a new status of someone that you have saved in your calendar and with whom you have not spoken for years. Also, scrolling through your chats, you will see a blue halo around the profile photo because that contact has uploaded a Status. And don’t forget to check the group “People who play paddle tennis” from the “Urbanization X” Community, which has five other groups.

And is it used? It is something that WhatsApp knows better than anyone, but I personally do not know anyone who uses the communities. In the same way, I have 851 contacts in the calendar and only eight people who have posted Statuses in the last 24 hours. Nor have I found an opportunity to use the chats that disappear, or participate in a group with 500 people, or make a video call with 32 people, or send 2 GB files. Because? Because There are already other alternatives for that..

If I want to participate in thematic communities, there are few better options than Discord. If I want to share a photo with my friends, I have Instagram (on paper, I don’t actually use it). It is not necessary for an application to have everything, because in the end the app it becomes unnecessarily complex, and if not tell Facebook, the already mentioned Instagram or Twitter (which right now is a bit chaotic). Sometimes the simple, being simple, is the best.

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Images | Own and WhatsApp