Facebook mobile is a suboptimal experience, which is fine, it just reminds me to use it less.
Then I your post and now I realize I’m still in the Meta world. Forgot about whatsapp for a second.
What pisses me off, though, is that I didn't find a way to give a contact a name without allowing it access to the phone's contacts.
But now Whatsapp retains access to all the photos I added unless I go into settings and revoke access to those photos. Creepy.
And yeah the contacts thing also pisses me off. They know what they are doing.
Every Galaxy I ever owned came with uninstallable facebook apps, despite paying over 1k for the phone.
On the last one I had, I went in and did the ritual deleting facebook, and going in the settings to disable their other background apps.
I checked the phone 8 months later, and found that they had installed even more facebook apps that were now running without my consent.
That was the end of those phones for me, and I'm amazed that I put up with it for so long.
Not really, given whatsapp could be theoretically keeping a local copy and the operating system can't really do anything about it. It would also be a pretty weird case to code. Imagine writing an app where if you tried to save a file, you couldn't immediately access it afterwards.
It works fine in other apps such as Signal and even Teams.
I don't really want Moxie or MSFT to have persistent access to any part of my personal photo album either, no matter how good they say they'll be.
Photos -> share photo -> whatsapp
Instead of starting from whatsapp
[1] https://manualdousuario.net/en/a-less-affectionate-approach-...
I think this is good enough. If you consider they do shady stuff with your pictures, you might as well consider that they hold on to anything they get their hands on right away.
For example, when you receive an audio message, if you want to listen to it, it will request full media access. Android apps can access media files they have created, so this permission isn't needed. But without granting media access (or tricking it into thinking it has it, like with GrapheneOS' storage scopes), WhatsApp won't let you listen to the audio. Same when trying to open an image full screen instead of just the in-chat preview.
If this were a small developer, I could assume it was done that way accidentally or to cut some corners. Coming from Meta, I can only assume malice.
Having given it that permission, I can share photos from within Whatsapp as well, without going to the Photos app. I'm not sure if the file picker that pops up is a Whatsapp component (meaning the "Limited" permission is essentially unlimited) or if it's a system component. I mean the latter would make sense, but I'm too cynical to believe it works that well.
I never understood why Apple allows access to the full address book including all Apple-specific settings such as "spouse" and "home address" that are useful within iOS. There should be a minimal permission mode: name and phone number only.
My idea is that if WhatsApp can't be trusted, once it gets access to any file, it will hold on to it. So revoking access to something it already has won't accomplish all that much, since I've already figured that I can share that file with them.