A Minor Warning About WhatsApp: The PC Version Doesn’t Work If Your Phone Breaks

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — 1/80 sec, f/4.5, ISO 100 —
map & image data — nearby photos

Sunrise from Mt. Fuji

just prior to a storm

The photo above is from a hike on Mt. Fuji a few days ago, which I'll write about soon (I hope),
but today's post is about the WhatsApp messaging service, and something I discovered about it
during my Fuji trip.

On a bicycle ride on Mt. Fuji, while in the middle of taking a photo with my iPhone, the
iPhone just spazzed out and died, and I was left without a way to contact the
others I was traveling with. Unfortunately, the ride went some hours longer than I
had anticipated, and I'm sure my friends worried.

When I returned to the hotel, my friends had gone out and left a message for me expressing their worry,
so I wanted to contact them using WhatsApp on my laptop. But it wouldn't connect.... it turns out that
WhatsApp won't do anything if it can't contact your phone first. My phone was a useless brick,
so I was stuck.

Other messaging services that I use both on my phone and my laptop — LINE and Facebook Messenger — worked fine, so
I could contact others to report my mostly-unreachable-while-on-the-road state, but I was cut off from everyone for whom WhatsApp
was my main method of communication. This was unfortunate.

I've a special spot in my heart for WhatsApp, because it was created by a
couple of friends, and I gave them some minor help early on. I was one of its first users, before it was a messaging app, and
was literally the first WhatsApp user in Japan. But these days I tend to use LINE more, both because it has more reach in Japan
(WhatsApp has much more reach outside of Japan), and because I find that LINE has more features that are important to me.

If you use WhatsApp, just know that you're running a risk: if your phone dies, or is lost/stolen, or runs out of battery,
you're cut off from all your contacts, even if you have WhatsApp running on your computer.