WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging apps out there today, and it claims to have over 1.3 billion monthly active users. With many new features in the pipeline, it’s seeing solid development too. But there are still some issues that WhatsApp needs to fix.
Slowdown with active groups after the 100-150K messages mark
I have the misfortune of being a part of many groups that see at least 3000+ messages sent in a day. This can rack up over 100K messages in as low as a month and a half month and often causes problems. The result is that when you try and send a message in a WhatsApp group that has a large number of messages, the message sends out after quite a bit of delay. Not only does that occur, but searching for messages in WhatsApp also slows down drastically.
However, you will not find any difference in speed with other conversations that are not as active, and it will feel as if there is not an issue here. So what you have to do in order to make sure that the same group works as flawlessly as before is to delete the entire conversation, and hope that the important messages are starred or saved elsewhere. Not a great solution, to be honest.
One possible explanation of why this occurs is that WhatsApp stores all the messages that you have in a database which is stored locally on your device. This is why WhatsApp tends to get bigger in size as time passes by since the media and messages keep adding up to the DB. Constantly searching a large database is probably the reason why there is a slowdown after a certain number of messages.
In order to be sure, I asked a bunch of people in the same and in different chats to tell me if they faced the same issue. I have been able to reproduce this behavior across devices which have Lollipop, all the way up to Nougat. So this is definitely not a case of my own bad luck.
Image compression in Stories
All messaging services apply some form of image compression in order to make sure that bandwidth is not wasted on certain heavy users. This is fine, WhatsApp compression goes overboard in a lot of cases, and it has only recently added the feature of sending an image as a file to a user.
However, WhatsApp stories are still heavily compressed, to the point that images become pixelated. There should be an option to select the quality that statuses should reflect. Text suffers a lot due to compression, so WhatsApp recently added a way of adding text-only statuses. However, still, images are suffering from the heavy-handed compression algorithm that WhatsApp uses.
WhatsApp is testing more options for image compressions! 📸https://t.co/jYwKNYFwvE via @WABetaInfo #RT
— WABetaInfo (@WABetaInfo) September 15, 2017
However, it’s good to see that the developers are doing something about this, as reported by WABetaInfo.
Are you facing any of these issues? Do let us know in the comments section below
