14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook bought WhatsApp in February of this year with the promise to leave it intact. While we appreciate that it hasn’t been bloated with likes, friend requests, and timelines, we wouldn’t mind seeing the engineering team come up with an interface that actually supports existing handsets.
The headline pretty much says it all, but for those of you who are not wielding a 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus, here’s why it needs to be stressed.
No more one-handed use
Using an iPhone 6 Plus with one hand is difficult enough, even for people with big hands. That’s why Apple set in place that nice little gimmick where you tap the home button twice to lower the top of the UI within your thumb’s reach. It works, but it’s far from ideal.
The problem, however, isn’t the phone. We asked for big screens and Apple delivered. And while the original WhatsApp UI continues to make sense on the iPhone 6, the same thing cannot be said about the Plus. The UI is blown up so much that the client is now virtually unusable in some circumstances, such as landscape mode.
We’re not so pretentious as to ask for a complete overhaul, but they could at least resize the whole thing to take advantage of the large display. The keyboard is also nightmarishly large, with the keys unnecessarily spaced out. You can read only three individual message bubbles above the keyboard – hardly the experience promised by a 5.5-inch screen.
Notoriously lazy
The WhatsApp team is renowned for taking sluggish action in the face of such occurrences – new OS, new hardware, change of scenery. They were slow to react to Apple’s Retina display enhancement and 4-inch (iPhone 5) upgrade, and they were among the last top-class developers to ditch skeuomorphism when iOS 7 came about.
Another example of their take-my-time approach is the voice calling feature that many users are just dying to use. CEO Jan Koum told Code/Mobile conference attendees this week that WhatsApp voice calls wouldn’t be rolling out anytime soon because noise cancellation was “difficult.” It’s difficult, is it? So difficult that billions upon billions can’t make it happen? Guess Viber knows something they don’t.
But I digress. Really, the only thing they need to do right now is just implement a universal GUI for all the iPhones out there. It’s the sensible thing to do when you’re this big. I can imagine it’s no picnic for the UX and software engineering teams, but there are thousands of apps more complex than WhatsApp that have already added support for iPhone 6 Plus.
The iPhone 6 SDK was released to devs in September following the iPhone 6 launch. On September 23, the WhatsApp team released an update that contained (drumroll...) “bugfixes.”
What’s worse is that they won’t even say what the holdup is.
