[Krasnol]

Sounds more like your personal problem.

I live in Germany and use both. None do that and as I'm "the IT guy" for many people at work an din private, I'd have heard about it. Hell, the whole continent would have heard about it as whatsapp is widely used.

My Signal also doesn't do that.

[econ]

Since the whatsapp cliënt on desktop was replaced by a web wrapper it's even worse.

I don't even remember how the previous cliënt did it but my spelling suggestions are in English (as is the OS) but my chats are all in Dutch. Most words have a red underline.

It recently gave up downloading images. Turned out it was no longer allowed to write to its own folder. Not sure if this should be blamed on MS but from the (many) user perspective it just stopped working.

It keeps limited chat history which makes it inferior to IRC.

It badly wants you to use ai.

It has a spam channel where it promotes it self.

The phone app is decent tho

[opem]

Exactly, signal is decent on all the platforms, while mobile clients for whatsapp is somewhat tolerable if you ignore the constant AI push. But the web/desktop client is a pain in the ass to use.

[Krasnol]

I agree on all the content related things but your argument was about speed.

I use whatsapp web every day at work. The page. In my Firefox browser. It's almost constantly open. Never had any issues with that. The phone app just does what it's supposed to do and even on my Pixel6, it's just fast. I mean there is always faster but it's not even a second.

I use Whatsapp only because I have to. Privately, I prefer Signal. Works also great. Same with the windows app. Been using both since day 1. On a Pixel7Pro....

[opem]

Not at all, telegram clients in every platform are much much faster than whatsapp, signal etc. on the same platform. Although, this is more visible on older devices and on poor network conditions, I clearly see a difference in my newer devices too.

[Krasnol]

Could you give me one for Android which is really fast? I'd try that out on a phone with whatsapp and signal.

Also, what does "fast" mean? Fast on start?

[Paracompact]

There are three people in this thread with this "personal" problem.

[econ]

It's the gold standard for bad support: pretend the user has a problem.

There once was this thread on a blog for a windows XP pirated edition. Someone commented that something small didn't work. They replied in less than a minute, that's terrible! 10 minutes later the version was incremented and a new reply said: Try the new version! After 30 minutes the bug fix was confirmed.

They weren't trying to be funny but it still makes me laugh how it compares to Microsoft, the 3 trillion software company.

[Krasnol]

I worked for a long time in IT Support and this generalisation, like all of them, is false.

If someone tells me that a program crashes in 50% of the time on launch but it's only him reporting it, it is almost certainly his problem and not a problem of the program. Especially if you're supporting millions of people.

This is not some prejudice story people make up. It is happening. Every day to thousands of poor IT Warriors on the front.

[forgotmypw17]

But it's not "his" problem or "my" problem, it's "our" mutual problem for "us" to figure out together, collaboratively, down to its root causes, which are yet unknown. (And in the future, to mitigate and prevent, using whatever means are available to us.)

[Krasnol]

Maybe. If someone choses to do so in their capacity.

But they don't have to.

On the other side, suggesting that it is a general issue with those programs is wrong. Which is what I have been actually pointing out. This gives you the chance to check your devices and seek help if necessary.

This doesn't make my comment "bad support". I am not the tech support guy for HN.

[econ]

I sometimes send an email with 1) the things that don't work, 2) terrible ui, 3) possible improvements. Most often I've moved on to similar software that does what I want.

I get responses like. 1) It works for me, 2) you should have looked at this and that, 3) no one wants that/it works fine the way it is.

The worse part is that they wasted their time reading and responding.

I've had wonderful feedback on things I've made. The funniest were people who didn't understand standard ui convention. It had me wonder if I can expose mission critical parts some other way in case the user doesn't know how a hamburger menu works.

Imagine my shock when I learn a young user conditioned by modern flat buttons thought [shall we say] windows 95 industrial buttons are decorations. You can click on that???

If I pretend it is their problem I haven't actually solved anything.

[cardiffspaceman]

From USA, one mainly needs WhatsApp to chat with Latin Americans. Judging from the billboards I have seen in Argentina and Uruguay, there are a lot of Latin Americans getting WA free. So of course, why pay more?

[maximilianthe1]

>> why pay

Both WhatsUp & Telegram are completely free to use.

Telegram has premium features, but they are tangential to chatting & average use.

[forgotmypw17]

I'm confused about how it is that because it hasn't happened to you or anyone you know, it's my personal problem that closed-source software that I have no capability to modify is working slowly or failing to work at all?

[Krasnol]

As I wrote: If "WhatsApp program doesn't even work have the time -- it just gets stuck in the loading process." this would be true for half of the European Continent, since it's very popular there, there would be uprisings, memes, news. You could read people trying to fix it, find out why, etc.

There is nothing. It's not just me who doesn't know ANYBODY with those issues.

So the logical conclusion is: you're either lying or you have a problem on your own device other people don't have.