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WhatsApp Teases Long-Awaited iPad App

MacRumors said:


The popular messaging app WhatsApp has teased a long-awaited iPad app, which would be offered alongside its existing iPhone and Mac apps.

Whatsapp-Feature.jpg

The official WhatsApp account on X today reacted with an eyes emoji to a post saying that WhatsApp should release an iPad app. This could be a hint that Meta is gearing up to release WhatsApp for iPad, which has already been available for beta testing via TestFlight for nearly two years. File this news under "finally."

With an Instagram app for the iPad also reportedly in the works, it appears that Meta is at last embracing the iPad for more of its most popular apps.

In addition to WhatsApp and Instagram, Meta owns Facebook and Threads. There is an iPad app for Facebook, but the Threads app remains iPhone only.

Article Link: WhatsApp Teases Long-Awaited iPad App
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If they do one for the watch, I may reinstall it, although with RCS, I really don't have any need for it at all anymore.
 
Believe it when we see it, how many times have we heard this? We all hate Meta (or should) but, unfortunately if we like it or not, many of us have relatives who use whatsapp and it's the primary way of contacting them. Basically, we're stuck with it.
 
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germanbeer007 said:
- You have a limit of how many devices can use the WhatsApp account. I have a PC desktop, PC Laptop, MacBook, 2x iPads, iPhone, Android. All of those devices can use the same account for Telegram. But for Whatsapp, you're limited to only 5 devices maximum.
- Messages aren't saved in the cloud. Need to sync messages between two devices locally.
- On linked devices, if you don't launch Whatsapp for several days, it logs you out. You then need to link the device again and have messages re-sync
- The problem with linking devices is that it requires a second device to link. If I'm outside with only my phone, I'm SOL.
- Right now if I scroll up, for some reason many old messages say "Waiting for this message. This may take a while". I have all 5 devices running whatsapp. Apparently there's data loss when one of my devices logged out so that's gone forever.
- For some reason only Android devices lets you use multiple WhatsApp accounts. I have one for family and one for business. I can't switch accounts on iOS
- You need to use iCloud AND Google storage space to backup your messages. Whatsapp doesn't provide cloud storage for you.
- Backups happen automatically only once a day. If you talked a lot that day then lose your phone, you will lose all messages for that day.

And so on.
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What about security? Do you feeel that meta’s security rhetoric (recent commercials saying they can’t read messages etc) is true or hollow speak?…
 
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yuvaldv1 said:
It's a messaging app, what do you expect?
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Do you not have different sets of friends, work colleagues, etc.? When I registered with WhatsApp under a different phone number, I certainly I didn't expect everyone in my regular phone contact list (doctors, a house painter hired a few months ago, neighbors, etc.) to suddenly be mutually visible anyway. Different services for different groups.

Meta harvests everything it can, and I'd refused to have the Facebook app on the phone for over a decade. But that painter showed up in my Facebook friend suggestions the next time I made the mistake of signing in on my desktop. And so did a lot of their contacts. That's creepy. I deleted the WhatsApp account, but some of that data still lingers.

I wonder how they plan to let wifi-only iPads sign up for new WhatsApp accounts?
 
dkh587 said:
It doesn't, unless I'm missing something. It now has the option to store contacts within the app, although I don't know if this is fully rolled out yet.
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In the Android app, I was able to revoke access, but then it wouldn't keep contact icons, nor some other information. Of course, the official bot's entry still had full everything.
 
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For those in the US wondering why WhatsApp has become the standard messaging app elsewhere, it’s pretty simple. We used to pay a lot for texting (here in Italy it was around 200 lire each, limited to 160 characters). Picture messages, aka MMS, came later and cost as much as €1 each, for some stamp-sized junk… and no guarantee people on the other side had their phone set up to receive them across carriers.

As soon as smartphones and data plans came out, WhatsApp filled a niche: being able to send “free” messages by using some of the data allowance at the time. Suddenly it was much more practical to pay e.g. €15/month for 1 GB and have virtually unlimited texting than pay €0.10/text. Especially for younger people, it was a no-brainer.
It’s also less of an issue now that our data plans exploded (I pay €10 for 250 GB on mobile, and €30 for 2.5/1 Gbit fiber with transfer no cap at home), but why would one use regular texts with far less features nowadays? RCS isn’t available everywhere, and older android phones may not support it anyway.

And that’s another reason: iPhones are the dominant species of smartphones only in North America; most people use Android elsewhere, because they’re cheaper and there’s way more variety and they offer more customization (for better or worse) and some people prefer that. WhatsApp also filled that cross-platform niche, and that remains true to this day. We don’t suffer from green bubble anxiety like some US-based reports mentioned, but we also for the most part don’t even see that people have a blue bubble because in most cases one just defaults to WhatsApp anyway.

I personally prefer telegram due to bots, groups, a proper desktop app and so on, but WhatsApp is inescapable. Companies use it, doctors use it, literally everyone uses it. I book my dog’s washing through it, I get therapy reminders through it, and when I called a new dentist for an appointment he asked me to use that for confirmation. My dad gets call from his cousin over WhatsApp audio.

It’s just an issue of critical mass: while a lot of people also installed telegram over time, most people still prefer WhatsApp because they got to have all their contacts in the same place. It also makes cross-contact communication easier (groups, forwards, etc.)

They saw a market opportunity at the very beginning and turned it into a basic need. No wonder Meta eventually bought them up!
 
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germanbeer007 said:
Why people use WhatsApp over Telegram is beyond me. The worst and most annoying messenger app in the world. Classic example of security and privacy negatively impacting UX
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  1. WhatsApp became popular before Telegram or Signal, notably after the death of BlackBerry.
  2. People use WhatsApp because other people use WhatsApp - it's the network effect.
  3. Meta owns WhatsApp (and Instagram and Facebook), hence there's synergy among them.
 
1. Download Beeper

2. Never have to use WhatsApp and it’s annoying AI ever again.
 
izzy0242mr said:
Uh, no. I expect Apple to allow an app written for iOS to be run on an iOS device (iPadOS is iOS with some tweaks as we all know). There's something called "windowed mode."

Just more proof that iOS is inferior to the competition, I guess.
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It is actually the other way around. META decided NOT to support it on iPadOS. It is not a limitation by Apple but a choice they give the developers. Just like you cannot install Netflix on your Mac, you could, but Netflix doesnt want to use the option. It is actually just a toggle in the AppStore dashboard settings
 
artifex said:
In the Android app, I was able to revoke access, but then it wouldn't keep contact icons, nor some other information. Of course, the official bot's entry still had full everything.
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Shouldn't that be proof that they don't actually "harvest" the data? Otherwise they could still show the contact photos but seems like it is only linked from the contact app directly
 
sdugoten said:
In a lot of country other that US, Whatsapp = the default messaging app. If you don't use it, you are basically cutting yourself from everyone else. A lot of company in those country also use whatsapp as a way for team messaging app.

The default "Message" app in IOS is not used at all other than receiving safekey code from bank in a lot of country around the globe. For example, Japan don't use "Message" nor "Whatsapp", they use Line. So, if the server for Line is down in Japan for whatever reason, that means EVERYONE in Japan lost the way to contact ppl on phone. Yes, I really mean EVERYONE in Japan.

Not everyone use "Message" app, esepcially those who don't live in the States. The "default" messaging app could be different around the globe.
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I think the point was that while the de-facto/most popular messaging app might be different in many countries, Messages' green bubble protocols are tied to phone service and are thus an omnipresent lowest common denominator. We U.S.-based Apple users often have WhatsApp, Messenger, or other apps installed, even if we and the majority of our contacts prefer iMessage, because we know that one person (always seems to be an elderly relative) who is unwilling or unable to use anything else. And conversely, if everyone you know would rather not talk to you than swipe over from WhatsApp to Messages once in a while, then maybe there's an issue here beyond choice of apps...
 
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