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WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

(www.nytimes.com)
713 points greenburger | 2 comments | 16 Jun 25 13:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.469s | source
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andrepd ◴[16 Jun 25 14:00 UTC] No.44289568[source]▶
Would be nice if these kinds of articles would at least take a paragraph to plug some alternatives, such as Signal.
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jahnu ◴[16 Jun 25 14:12 UTC] No.44289679[source]▶
Signal have a few things that make it a hard sell.

It's really hard to clean up media. You have to go into every single chat and from there go about deleting stuff. At least they finally added a "select all" option in there recently.

So the size of it just grows and grows and grows until it's using all the space on your phone. Not a good fit for non-technical types.

Secondly, no web view. There is the desktop app yes, which is flaky, slow and wants to update every day or two.

I just can't see average people putting up with those inconveniences and that's just a couple of them.

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1. pndy ◴[17 Jun 25 08:14 UTC] No.44296788[source]▶
Signal does other things which annoy me to the point I can't consider it as a viable option for me, my family and close friends. For a start, it wants a full access to contacts and if doesn't get it it pops internal notification about it - but that one is easily dismissible. But then, I keep a strict notification settings on all my devices and Signal doesn't like that and wants me to turn these on. Perhaps because they can't otherwise push notifications about donation - which also appears within the app.

People behind Signal have a very corporate approach to their app where a permanent "no" doesn't exist when it comes to user choice - all what you have is "not now".

Then there's linking devices; it's not permanent but temporary and devices are removed automatically after 30 days. You can't even log into your account with tablet any more - that was replaced with linking. Cross-platform synchronization - didn't work for me at all despite being a loudly announced success.

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2. lurk2 ◴[17 Jun 25 09:47 UTC] No.44297319[source]▶
> For a start, it wants a full access to contacts and if doesn't get it it pops internal notification about it - but that one is easily dismissible.

This is at least an improvement over WhatsApp, which removes core functionality (e.g. creating groups) when this access is refused