I don’t like WhatsApp, but some people simply refuse to use anything else (“better”) and the web clients can bridge the gap but it’s extremely annoying not being able to answer a call with a person you are texting
Easy, I don't talk to such people. They can have my email or phone number if truly necessary. Yes, same for family or work, just not using Meta products for communication. Surprisingly enough people do understand.
But please tell your contacts that you're using bridges, if you haven't already.
You are effectively giving away encryption keys to a third party, since those messages need to be decrypted and re-encrypted mid-transit.
Everyone who is part of the chats you use bridges with deserves to know about that fact, at least.
Technically you could run an Android container on Linux like with Waydroid and get WhatsApp too, it's just that there'll probably be more Android users
You shouldn't use this app in the first place. It had many data breaches and it copy everything from Telegram (maybe everyone copies, but I don't use other apps). I only mainly use Telegram and Matrix.
It's impossible to convince that to friends and family. In my country everyone use WhatsApp as primary messaging app . It's kind of like iMessage situation in US
It's nice that a lot of my surroundings have finally jumped to Telegram. Previously it was Viber (bleh). But it's much hard to go to Matrix because it's much much less feature rich and less polished then Telegram. I can easily use it as a basic text messenger, but that's about it. So Telegram is a solid middle ground. Can't wait for the multi server Matrix accounts.
I honeslty haven't had any issues with it. But I'm sire others are. I feel like that's the biggest challenge since there's a ton of distros and architectures
Where I live everything is on WhatsApp. You want to get ahold of a business: WhatsApp, friends organizing a party: WhatsApp, want to check the traffic: WhatsApp.
There are plenty of desktop wrappers available for the Web version. I don't use WhatsApp often but from my experience it seems fairly similar to the Windows desktop app
Afaik they created a Windows client that's native sort of recently and I'm pretty sure it's a better experience than the web version because that's one slow as hell to initially load for me.