For not having WhatsApp?

[Babysleeeeeeep]

I had WhatsApp for years and found it so liberating to delete it.

I found all the groups, different conversations and constant pinging really annoying and hard to keep up with. Between work groups, different family chats, friends groups, nursery group, faith group, hobby group etc etc it felt like a fill time job keeping up with everyone! I don’t like social media so aren’t on any of those.

I get asked all the time ‘why don’t you have WhatsApp??’ Said with quizzical confused faces. Family pressure me to get it as they like keeping everyone up to date in one go....so it’s for their convenience really.

People say ‘just mute the notifications’ or ‘just join OUR chat ignore the others’ which surely negates the point? I don’t seem to have missed out by receiving messages via good old fashioned texting...

Am I missing something with WhatsApp??

It's not social media. It's another version of texting. But as people have said, free internationally and for pictures. You can also call people over WiFi when you have no phone signal.

Lots of families, organisations, friend groups, etc like to use it as you can update several people in a conversation at once and so it makes it easier to share and organise things.

It's of course up to you if you have it, or use it, but don't expect others to go out of their way to message you separately if you are one of their few contacts who refuse to use the app. Most group organisers don't have time to copy messages across for people who can't be bothered to use the same contact method as everyone else.

I would say about 10% of the messages I get each day are via text, less than 5% via Facebook and the rest via WhatsApp. The only texts I usually get are from work, or people I know that don't have a data contract.