I come from point of ignorance and agree with you.
I do not understand what privacy security or anonymity I can have, when we start with sharing my most identifiable personal information with the app and all my desired contacts. (whatsapp takes it further by refusing to work without full access to your contacts which... Just, no).
I feel I'm in a twilight zone as everybody cheerful regresses to apps you have to bootstrap with your phone number and then proceed to basically only work well with your phone - teeny tiny screen with awful keyboard, instead of allowing me seamless access across my communication devices and preferences.
Messaging seemed like a solved problem until we made it inexplicably and massively worse.
I can only talk to people if they've granted access to their contact list, and initiate conversation with me (which is not a solution, just a shifting of problem to others).
On android at least, I cannot initiate a conversation with somebody I don't have a going chat with. It won't let me just type in a phone number.
Specifically, Clicking "new chat" asks me for contacts permission, and if I say no it simply closes. I have to contact a person out of band and ask them to initiate whatsapp with me. By no definition is my experience "just fine". Is this not your experience?
Can two people who have not granted access, converse?
Perhaps this has changed, but my experience was that the installation wouldn't proceed without granting access. I could prevent the app gaining access to my contacts by using the Android home/work profile so that it would only see an empty contact database. There are other tricks you can use on Android, but I never got it to work on iOS.
I do not understand what privacy security or anonymity I can have, when we start with sharing my most identifiable personal information with the app and all my desired contacts. (whatsapp takes it further by refusing to work without full access to your contacts which... Just, no).
I feel I'm in a twilight zone as everybody cheerful regresses to apps you have to bootstrap with your phone number and then proceed to basically only work well with your phone - teeny tiny screen with awful keyboard, instead of allowing me seamless access across my communication devices and preferences.
Messaging seemed like a solved problem until we made it inexplicably and massively worse.