this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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WhatsApp seems very conservative with adding new features. I generally feel the features they do decide to add are all pretty useful. Telegram on the other hand doesn't ever seem to slow down with the new features. Many of them seem great, but just as many I would never use. I'm still wondering why Telegram won't introduce end-to-end encryption as a default.
The whole sticker implementation is absolute dog shit. How hard could it be to do a half decent implementation with customizable keywords for searching, custom sticker categorization, and backups? I have hundreds, if not over a thousand, stickers and it's impossible to access them quickly to find the one you want. You end up just adapting to whatever is on your most used list, and you're stuck scrolling for a while to find a different sticker, which In an active chat group it means you end up reacting super late to everything and the chat has moved on at that point.
MSN and the MSN+ plugin had this nailed down 20 years ago. Even telegram has a better implementation where you just add the entire sticker library for each new sticker; you end up with stickers you didn't ask for, which is a negative, but everything ends up categorized in SOME way at least.
Its also ridiculous that whatsapp can't be bothered to offer sticker creation in-app.
Dont get me started on chat participants count limitations and how utterly USELESS archiving a chat is. You can mute the chat and archive it, and a single message will just pop it back to the top of your list, as if you weren't trying to actively avoid that. And whatsapp has been pretty useless for big chat groups such as big neighborhoods and the like. My HOA hasn't added me or my friends to the neighborhood chat groups historically due to size limitations, which in itself perpetuated a toxic approach from the HOA where only sycophants are allowed into these groups. Most neighbors are left in the dark over decisions and meetings, which is utter stupidity and has 100% been aggravated by whatsapp's limitations. Doesn't matter that they've implemented alternatives to this, you try to get hundreds of boomers to understand how to use community chats.
You must live in a huge neighbourhood. Your points are valid, though you can now choose to keep chats archived even when receiving a message. Settings > Chats > Keep chats archived.
e2e encryption makes it difficult to provide fully cross-platform messaging experience, this is probably why they are not looking at it
They aren't implementing e2e by default because that would limit the amount of data they collect and sell to intelligence agencies.
Why?
I can easily encrypt a message on my x86_64 Windows desktop, send it to my x86_64 Linux laptop, and also my ARM64 Android phone, and be able to decrypt it perfectly.
If I can do it then a development team can too.
You can easily implement AES 256 in JavaScript. So you can tap the web framework on any device and run your app on just about any platform.
The problem is, They no longer get signal intelligence from it and can no longer monetize it.
Why would it be difficult? Encryption isn't difficult (any more than adding any essential feature would be) and is platform independent. It doesn't matter what device you're using, encryption and decryption are commonly used.