I wish that WhatsApp could make a public API. I'm very thankful that Facebook is integrating WhatsApp into their services, because that gives me hope that a true web interface will be developed.

For me, it takes between 10 hours (worst case) to 5 minutes (best case) to open WhatsApp.

My iPhone 4S is too old, so opening WhatsApp gives a message "This version of WhatsApp ha..., Update WhatsApp, Your update will be free of cha...". Clicking Update WhatsApp opens the App Store, and clicking Update results in another error message: "This application requires iOS 10.0 or later."

So I only use WhatsApp through BlueStacks Android emulator on my personal laptop. That's what leads to the 10 hour worst-case response time: a full working day, including commute. The 5 minute best-case is because BlueStacks takes a very long time to open, and runs my laptop fans really loud.

This is not only a pain point with WhatsApp, it's also a problem with WeChat, KakaoTalk, LINE, even 9gag (for posting videos).

Meanwhile, email continues to work just fine on my decade-old phone, mbasic.facebook.com is particularly speedy, iMessage still works, and Hacker News is great :)

Hey, if you do prefer that, I too have a broken phone, but the new multi-device beta let's you to have whatsapp in your computer with a powered-off phone. That works for me.

https://faq.whatsapp.com/web/download-and-installation/how-t...

Those are all the apps with the worst privacy policy set at the Google and Apple stores.

But this speaks to good architecture decisions, right?

If they tried to make a shared framework that ran the same codebase everywhere and then port it onto different platforms (cough facebook) then you don't get these nice isolated issues, for example.

Yes, if you don't write a native app for every platform the result will be rubbish. That's not a "good architecture decision", that is common sense. If they don't do it that way it's to save money, because as we all know Facebook is strapped for cash. (Talking about Facebook and Instagram here, because as far as I know WhatsApp is completely native on every platform)

This then also means a well defined server API without undocumented behaviour that individual implementations depend on. I stand by my assertion that the good scaling and separable builds is a sign of good architecture.

Isn't a non-leaky abstraction a given too?

All these requirements are like saying "having a good experience using this app requires an app that doesn't crash all the time". Well, duh?

Life would be a lot easier if good engineering practices everywhere were a given.