WhatsApp Appears To Be About To Launch Its Long-Overdue iPad App (theverge.com) 8
An anonymous reader shares a report: A few lucky WhatsApp beta testers got a surprising treat this week: the company appears to be testing a version of its iOS app that is also optimized for the iPad. As first spotted by WABetaInfo, version 23.19.1.71 of WhatsApp's TestFlight app includes the new iPad app as well. From what we can see in screenshots, the iPad app works exactly like you'd expect. You connect to it by scanning a QR code the same way you'd link your account to any other device. You'll see a list of your conversations on the left and your current chat on the right. It's pretty much the iOS app, but instead of seeing one pane at a time, you see both. It almost makes you wonder what took so long, especially when WhatsApp head Will Cathcart said all the way back in January of 2022 that "we'd love to do it."
Still don't understand why it requires a cellphon (Score:2)
I have never understood why whatsapp requires a phone number and a cell phone at all. It's great you can link your desktop and iPad now, but the requirement to go back through your phone baffles me.
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I have never understood why whatsapp requires a phone number and a cell phone at all. It's great you can link your desktop and iPad now, but the requirement to go back through your phone baffles me.
Same reason why Twitter had a character limit - the historical context of the app. WhatsApp wasn't a messaging platform. It was an app to identify the online status of an iPhone's contact list. That last part is critical: it needed to be tied to something your phone already knew - people's phone numbers. It wasn't until version 2.0 (which came 5 months after the miserable failure of simply being an online status tool) that they introduced messages... for contacts in your iPhone's contact list. If I'm using
Re: Still don't understand why it requires a cellp (Score:2)
Thanks for your explanation.
Someone here said the other day that WhatsApp needed a phone number to know whom to send the massage to, but in my experience, it didn't make sense, since it only annoyed me with a phone requirement to activate, and even worked without a SIM card.
However, don't iPads have contact lists? (Not a rhetorical question.)
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Except that is is now. I can run WhatsApp on a phone with no SIM card and it works fine to make and receive calls, and to chat and message. It's time for then to cut this now artificiality limitation. It's been an ongoing frustration for some time now. That and the inability to run it on multiple devices like a spouse's phone without give through the long procedure which expires after a while and has to be redone.
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Somehow my phone corrected "link" to long. Hopefully ai will fix the autocorrect problem some day. Haha.
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I have never understood why whatsapp requires a phone number and a cell phone at all. It's great you can link your desktop and iPad now, but the requirement to go back through your phone baffles me.
Because it's what they built their authentication system around.
Whatsapp is from a time when Telco's still pretended a text cost A$0.50 each to send. It was meant to be an alternative to that, not a full blown communication client on it's own. Given most people using Whatsapp will still be using their phone number, it's not legacy code you can depreciate.
It's not like Zoom or even Skype which was meant to be a web based communication system from the start.
Nobody cares (Score:2)
Nobody cares ...
or at least nobody statistically significant.