Holy shit WhatsApp is the most abusive dark-pattern app I've ever touched.
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The account setup process prompts for a bunch of permissions it shouldn't need with plausible fake reasons to give them, including permission to harvest all your SMS messages.
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Then it won't let you message anyone without exposing your contacts to it. You have to get them to message you first to create an open chat to bypass, or get a third party to share a contact link to you.
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It gets worse. Then, it won't let you listen to voice messages you've already received without giving it permission to access all your data - presumably it wants to save to a file then play from the file.
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never mind that apps literally have an internal folder where they can store data and play audio from
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Right. They're doing this specifically because they want to harvest your photos. Google should hit them with a banhammer for that.
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They'll be forced to move to API 30+ on the Play Store in the near future. API 29 began phasing out legacy shared storage access but provided a way for apps to opt into the legacy system. It was supposed to remove it like API 30 does but there was a successful backlash campaign.
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The change was heavily misrepresented. Journalists happily went along with portraying apps needing to request case-by-case access as a horrible draconian restriction on their capabilities. Happened anyway for API 30. Not much backlash this time even though it's the same thing...
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There's still a coarse-grained way to ask for access to photos, unfortunately. That should really go away too. They haven't been nearly as aggressive as they should be in forcing apps to request case-by-case access to files and directories. Was pushed for years but hardly used.