Why I stopped using WhatsApp even though it is so popular

Although WhatsApp is ubiquitous among my friends and family, as well as within my professional network, I quit the popular messaging app three years ago. Here’s why I don’t regret it.

1 I hate walled gardens for communication

The Internet was built on the spirit of openness and hyper-connectivity. But tech platforms prefer walled gardens.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, wrote an essay for Scientific American more than a decade ago in which he warned that these companies were restructuring the Web itself—turning the expanse of interconnected Web sites built on open infrastructure into a series of “fragmented islands” where users held hostage.

People around me are messaging each other, sharing tons of photos, and building communities on WhatsApp. The more of these things they do, the more captive they are to the walled garden and the harder it is to leave. Their primary communication is nested within WhatsApp – mostly for network effect and not necessarily out of choice.

I prefer my messages to be platform independent like email. No matter what email client you use, you will still receive email at your address. That’s why I use SMS (of course with the modern help of RCS messages on Android).

I’m not locked into apps, operating systems or carriers. Not everyone in the world is on WhatsApp. Moreover, there are people who continue to use feature phones instead of smartphones. Texts arrive to them without me bothering to check if they are on WhatsApp (or Telegram or Signal).

Personally, for me, open communication is more important than all the bells and whistles that the service offers.

While WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption, it regularly collects metadata attached to your messaging activities — IP addresses, phone numbers, as well as “the time, frequency and duration of your activities and interactions.”

Yes, your messages are always private, but WhatsApp actively collects your metadata to create your digital persona in other meta properties, including Instagram and Facebook. That’s a problem for me.

While SMS/RCS may not win the privacy battle, my mistrust of Meta is based on its history. In 2023, for example, WhatsApp was fined €5.5 million by the Irish data watchdog for breaching privacy regulations and a lack of transparency about how it handles information. Violations of privacy allow the company to be more effective in targeted advertising, but it has also led to third-party attacks, disinformation campaigns, and even political manipulation.

3 Most WhatsApp groups are a pain

WhatsApp groups have been great for group messaging between friends and family members as well as work colleagues. But the magic quickly wore off.

Once WhatsApp increased the limit of users who could be in a group, it led to large and ever-expanding groups for large communities (such as my astronomy group, which used to function as a mailing list for astronomy enthusiasts), a group of all the parents of the children in my seven-year-old’s class children, the association of all the residents of our condominium – you will understand. Large email conferences or forums have moved to WhatsApp and it’s quite messy.

Navigating large groups is difficult – there is no organization like email or forum threads. One often loses the context of a conversation, an important message slips by in case a flood of messages comes after it, and constant notifications are also distracting.

While a large number of people have adopted it for their work or personal communities and networks, it is not an ideal approach to productivity. In addition, there are also privacy issues as all users’ phone numbers are visible to all group members. While it’s fine in a closed group, it’s uncomfortable in large groups with several strangers.

4 Decreasing quality of WhatsApp

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The quality of online products and services has declined over time to maximize profit for shareholders. There are many examples of what started out as a great free service that ended up declining in quality due to the pressure to monetize. WhatsApp is no exception.

WhatsApp now offers a myriad of ways to engage with your network, from increasing membership in groups and introducing communities to introducing story-like status messages to now bringing Meta AI to the fore. WhatsApp works as an all-in-one platform because people spend more time on the app, but it kills the intuitiveness of the messaging app. The company has even experimented with things like digital payments in India.

WhatsApp has also opened the door for businesses to use the service to send persistent spam marketing communications that flood your inbox so much that you often miss the conversations that matter to you. Of course, that last bit is also a problem with SMS, and most people have moved to WhatsApp to escape all that spam. But here we are!

Instead of building features to make people more productive or better at communicating and collaborating—building integrations with email, photo sharing services, cloud storage services, and other tools, or even other Meta properties—the app is now quicksand that keeps pulling you, and not in in a good way.

So yes, I don’t use WhatsApp even though it annoys a lot of my friends and family members and I miss out on a lot of gossip and banter.

That said, there are downsides to not using the service. Our local pharmacy accepts medical prescriptions via WhatsApp and delivers medicines to your home. Now I have to try to decipher the doctor’s handwriting and understand the medical jargon used to order medicine over the phone.

While several local businesses and mom-and-pop shops use WhatsApp as their only interface without a website or app, many new-age online services and even government agencies use WhatsApp as their primary support channel. I also miss a lot of communities that I’m interested in but that only work on WhatsApp, like my neighborhood basketball group or the aforementioned astronomy society.

That’s why it’s not a smooth ride, but I’ve made up my mind. I prefer the easy nature of texting. And with RCS support on iPhones, it’s now even easier to talk to people across the fence.