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Comment by fmavituna | Hacker News Reader

There are many apps like this;

Skype, Whatsapp, Twitter, LinkedIn are come to my mind (a few of my personal list), heck even Flash & Java Runtime (same problem different field). For the lack of better and popular alternative we have to stick with these. LinkedIn being on of the prime examples.

Twitter on the other hand has a different problem, solutions such as FriendFeed was a much better, almost by all means compared to Twitter (you could actually have a sensible conversation and while keeping almost all the benefits of Twitter) yet it didn't make people to switch from Twitter. Later acquired by Facebook, so I guess they succeeded.

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twitter and whatsapp may have shortcomings but I wouldn't put them in the same category as Skype and LinkedIn which a madnessfest.

Skype on the Mac is pretty serene.

I looked at my coworker's Windows Skype and was amazed to find a blinking advertisement he couldn't remove - did it by moving that area of the window offscreen.

Whatsapp doesn't deserve to be in that group... yet. Whatsapp was actually very good three years ago (good as in, I could just text without the interface annoying the fuck out of me). The last few updates have made it noticeably worse though.

How so? It seems to work pretty well for texting.

Sometimes, you might want to call somebody, and instead of leaving the app and opening phone/contacts, I used to click on the little phone icon in Whatsapp. If I do that now, it'll initiate a WhatsApp call, which sometimes works, but most of the time doesn't. If there was at least an option to select mobile, or WhatsApp calls... Furthermore, the only way to initiate a new conservation is by adding a new contact. In order to do that, I need to also upload all my contacts to WhatsApp. If my teachers wouldn't rely on us having WhatsApp (!!!), I'd probably ditch it at once...

Absolutely agree with that, the call option is annoying as hell. And they are adding more and more pointless features that benefit maybe 0.001% of the users.

Best example is now the ability to send PDFs. Making this the first button on the sent menu will totally make me want to use Whatsapp for all my document handling activities.

0,001% of the users is probably not accurate. I've used it for long distance calls every now and then, and if both are on WiFi or LTE, it works well enough. In reality, however, I'm never on LTE (because it is way too expensive) and seldom on WiFi.

When you get a message, it used to show it right on the screen, you don't have to launch the app (like text message). Now they just show the notification. I am not sure if there is a way to get the old style back, I am too lazy to experiment.

This is similar to those stupid emails which would force users to click through, login and then read the message instead of just including the message itself in the email. Which to me is insane.

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