About a week or two ago, I dug out an old Samsung cellphone. It still works and the camera’s decent, so I thought I’d give it a new lease on life. I planned to get a new SIM card, load WhatsApp for emergencies—and be done.
But I hit a snag: WhatsApp no longer supports older phones.
That got me wondering—what other apps are out there that do the same thing? I looked around and found a few names: Signal, Telegram, and Viber.
Signal is excellent for privacy and security, but hardly anyone I know uses it. Same goes for Telegram—it’s great in theory, but not very useful when your friends and family are still on WhatsApp.
Viber? I’m not sure what the current state of it is, but some digging revealed that it’s a bit of a data hog—it stores a lot and uses quite a bit in the background.
That brings me to another gripe: data usage. WhatsApp might be cheaper than traditional phone calls, but it still chews through data. Even a short call can eat up over a megabyte. People love sending videos, memes, and giant image files—all of which burn data fast. Meta, which owns both WhatsApp and Facebook, benefits all the way.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking WhatsApp entirely. It works. It’s reliable. And let’s be honest—it’s a whole lot better than the mess of a state telecom provider, which, even after being “privatised,” is still charging absurd rates and offering little in return. It took me nearly a year to cancel my landline, and I still don’t know what half the charges were for.
But sometimes I wish we had a proper alternative to WhatsApp. Something that actually works, isn’t owned by a tech giant, and doesn’t quietly gobble up your data.
And now, this:
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, has announced a WhatsApp competitor called Bitchat—a messaging app that supposedly won’t even need internet connectivity.
I don’t know how good it’s going to be, or if it’ll even take off. But it’s one to watch. If we’re lucky, more credible competitors will creep into the space and finally give Meta some proper competition.
Wouldn’t that be something?
