How to urgently contact WhatsApp engineer? Badly affected by forced update failu

3 points by WhatsappProblem ↗ HN
Ask HN: How to urgently get in touch with Whatsapp engineer? Adversely affected by the failure of Whatsapp forced update, which caused a lock out.

What is the best way to urgently get in touch with an engineer at Whatsapp?

They forced an app update again at Whatsapp, to add minor features for the iOS app, and they also use a block screen that blocks you from viewing your messages to force you to update the app.

So far, the past few forced updates have been fine and the block screen gets resolved. But this time the update did not work. There seems to be no available proper way to remove the block screen to access messages.

Now I am completely locked out of years of messages and the important people that I need to contact *urgently* today, by the block screen that says that Whatsapp has "expired" right now.

Will probably need help from an engineer at Whatsapp to resolve this issue. Urgently.

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For the future, Whatsapp engineers, please do this:

1. Please create a way to back up the data from the app into a computer via bluetooth transfer or airdrop transfer. People send private personal photos on whatsapp that should never be put on icloud or whichever android cloud.

2. If you want to force people to update the app, please ensure and guarantee proper backward compatibility. If you don't want that responsibility, then please do not force people to update the app and please do not use a block screen to force that.

3. Please stop using the forced block screen for the forced updates, unless you ensure and gurantee that the force update will always works on all devices, which will become less likely than not over the years. Locking people out of years of messages is just plain bad. People should always be able to view their messages stored on their own phone, especially when the storage on the phone itself.

4 comments

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Everytime I see posts like these it makes me happy that I ditched that horrible messaging app and moved to telegram.

The constant struggle against the monopoly to not betray me just wasn't worth it.

Does your message history outweigh the urgency of getting in touch with those people?

It's highly unlikely you can get an engineer to identify and ship a fix for an issue with no big impact on revenue, within a day.

I don’t have any advice about getting help from WhatsApp. I don’t even use it.

You have described a single point of failure — part of your critical workflow that can bring you or your business to a standstill. The usual advice comes down to eliminating SPFs and/or maintaining redundant copies.

In my opinion no one (and no business) should rely on free third-party services such as Facebook or WhatsApp to run their business. If you do you have one or more points of failure completely out of your control, with no recourse, and vendors who have no incentive to fix the problem. I know it does you no good now to hear this but you can make changes to prevent it happening again.

life lesson - if its important, pay for a service with support and SLA.

Otherwise, mitigate risk by exporting your communications into your own managed storage.