Because when Whatsapp was born, SMS were paid (and not cheaply). In my country, sending one SMS cost 0.19€ at the time and didn’t allow pics to be send. Meanwhile, with 10€ I could have 1-2GB of data that allowed for tens of thousands of messages to be sent while on mobile data and unlimited messages while I was on a wifi connection.
WhatsApp was also an independent company and worked really well compared with other apps. I remember checking alternatives like… 5 years ago and no other app was able to do video calls reliably. Since then Signal caught up and works great now but everyone is already on WhatsApp. EU was working interoperability requirements. That’s pretty much the only way to escape WhatsApp now.
I’ve been dealing with issues like that for around 30 years now, even since I started using Linux, so I’m used to it. You will never get 100% of features working on a alternative, open source, privacy respecting OS. If I want to share location I can copy coordinates from CoMaps or something. For live sharing there are self-hosted options.
Because when Whatsapp was born, SMS were paid (and not cheaply). In my country, sending one SMS cost 0.19€ at the time and didn’t allow pics to be send. Meanwhile, with 10€ I could have 1-2GB of data that allowed for tens of thousands of messages to be sent while on mobile data and unlimited messages while I was on a wifi connection.
WhatsApp was also an independent company and worked really well compared with other apps. I remember checking alternatives like… 5 years ago and no other app was able to do video calls reliably. Since then Signal caught up and works great now but everyone is already on WhatsApp. EU was working interoperability requirements. That’s pretty much the only way to escape WhatsApp now.
Signal still doesn’t do live location sharing I don’t think?
Signal requires Google Play Services to share location so it doesn’t work for me on Graphene OS at all.
Oh. That’s the kind of annoying thing that makes people not want to switch OS.
I’ve been dealing with issues like that for around 30 years now, even since I started using Linux, so I’m used to it. You will never get 100% of features working on a alternative, open source, privacy respecting OS. If I want to share location I can copy coordinates from CoMaps or something. For live sharing there are self-hosted options.