Interesting. Can you initiate a message?

I can only talk to people if they've granted access to their contact list, and initiate conversation with me (which is not a solution, just a shifting of problem to others).

On android at least, I cannot initiate a conversation with somebody I don't have a going chat with. It won't let me just type in a phone number.

Specifically, Clicking "new chat" asks me for contacts permission, and if I say no it simply closes. I have to contact a person out of band and ask them to initiate whatsapp with me. By no definition is my experience "just fine". Is this not your experience?

Can two people who have not granted access, converse?

You can open wa.me/<number> on a browser, it'll redirect to a chat on whatsapp.

Neat!

(I would still not call it "just fine" in terms of normal app usage, but it makes my life easier so I thank you for that :)

> Can you initiate a message?

Yes. There is a little write icon on the top-right of my iOS screen. Click that and paste in the number.

Fascinating. It will not allow me to initiate conversation on android without access to contact list. I wonder why the platform difference!

Perhaps this has changed, but my experience was that the installation wouldn't proceed without granting access. I could prevent the app gaining access to my contacts by using the Android home/work profile so that it would only see an empty contact database. There are other tricks you can use on Android, but I never got it to work on iOS.