Everyone has plans for 2020, WhatsApp included. The plans by WhatsApp includes rolling out a dark mode for those who cannot stand bright screen, an option to reduce catfishing through the App, where if someone sends you an image purporting to be them, then you can reverse search the image to find out the original source of the image. Right now what you can do is to download the image and upload it on Google image search. Another feature WhatsApp wants to rollout is the auto deletable messages, where you will be able to send a message with an expiry time (1 hour, 1 day, all the way to 1 year). Apparently, none of these planned features are meant to solve the three WhatsApp Problems I find irritating.

Group Control

WhatsApp gave Group Admins some powers when they introduce the feature where only Admins can post messages to a group. This feature is rarely used as I am yet to join a group that is important to me and has the feature enabled. The last time I was added to such a group, I immediately left as the updates from the admins were not going to add value whatsoever.

That means I’m in this group where everyone is allowed to send in their two cents. What’s interesting is that despite clear rules in some of the groups, there is always that one person who wants to spam others with unrelated content. Now, there is no feature to discipline such big heads.

A feature that would eliminate this problem is “Restrict Member from posting” or “Admin must approve all posts”. Either of the two options will give admins the ability of ensuring posts adhere to Group’s Description and intended purpose.

Contact List

You have probably been irritated by this feature. Let’s say you want to send a message to three or four contacts, so you fire up your contact list, you get to the first contact, you message him. Then if you want to get to the next contact, you simply hit the back button to get back to the contact list. On ordinary contacts e.g. Contacts by Google, you will go right back to the position of the last contact you had checked. But WhatsApp thinks you need to be a little frustrated.

In WhatsApp, when you find your contact, message him, hitting back button takes you back to the Home screen of the App, so that you have to fire up contact list one more time, and start scrolling down a fresh.

I mean, how hard is it for WhatsApp to see how contact list is supposed to work? After selecting a contact, hitting the back button should take you back to the last position you had reached scrolling down the contact list.

Unread Messages

This is not a frustration for me because I never leave any messages unread. I’ll read all and ignore the useless ones. My blueticks are also on.

But there are those who never have time to read all unread messages. Then you realise they hadn’t read an important message whose deadline is around the corner, or just expired. So you call them, then they apologise that the message had been pushed down the message list so they forgot to check it out.

Simple solution for this would be WhatsApp to sort messages by Unread First, then Latest. With such a criteria, all unread messages will always be on top of your message list. That means after reading a message, it will automatically arrange itself below all unread messages.

These are the things WhatsApp needs to sort in 2020.

See also: How to Edit WhatsApp Status Updates – You can use the same process to steal someone’s updates