I don't know if anyone has tried. It's definitely possible, though.
I used to play some of those predatory mobile games. At some point I got sick of their addictive "daily tasks" game design and decided to automate all of it. I intercepted the game's network traffic: it was just JSON. Didn't take long to write software to talk to the server and do the tasks for me.
Any code that's running on the client can be tampered with or replaced. It's probably not going to be easy but it's certainly possible.
> WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram
WhatsApp is already among the best messaging services. It doesn't really do anything that would motivate people to replace it with something better. Having custom software which lacks the remote message deletion feature would be interesting but it would be too much work for too little gain.
I don't use Facebook and Instagram enough to have an opinion.
Whatever it takes to maintain control.