# WhatsApp
WhatsApp is a hugely popular messaging app with over 2 billion uers.
It's easy to use and the vast majority of rebels will already have it installed on their phones. Does this make it a good fit for your XR group?
### Security
Despite being end-to-end encrypted, WhatsApp has a number of serious
security issues that make it a poor choice for serious organisation in
XR. To start with, it is owned by Facebook, a company whose income
depends on collecting people's personal information. They can't read your actual messages, but there's still lots of metadata they can collect. You can read WhatsApp's privacy policy to
get an idea of the sorts of information that they are collecting.
Another issue with WhatsApp is that it makes it easy to backup chats to a cloud storage like iCloud or Google Drive, and that the option to make these backups encrypted is off by default. That means that any user in your chat who has a backup running (which is common) and hasn't manually set this to be encrypted will be uploading the whole chat (their messages and everybody else's messages in the shared chat) to a server. The data on that server can be read by the company or by security services with a warrant. However, you can now add End to End Encryption to this backup.
### Accessibility
WhatsApp has a lot in common with other messaging apps so it is usually
quite straightforward for rebels to learn how to use it. However, in
order to sign up to WhatsApp you need a smartphone, which not all rebels
will have access to. In order to use WhatsApp on a computer, the
smartphone that it's linked to must be connected to the internet
continuously, which is a hindrance.
### Features
You can\'t save messages for later or mark them as unread so you constantly
lose key info and can\'t find it again. However, you can pin key chats so that they remain at the top of the chat list. The message
box is small and you can\'t thread effectively so it is difficult to keep track of a
conversation.
Whatsapp have recently launched a new feature called Communities, which allows you to collect together multiple chats for your group into one space. Each community has a broadcast only channel that everyone in the community is subscribed to, and then you can add as many sub-groups as you like. This means chats can be arranged by topic, making it easier to keep on top of conversations. Each member can choose which chats they want to join, reducing information overwhelm from being in too many chats.
### Discoverability
Within WhatsApp, group admins can create and share links that rebels can
follow to sign up to the group. This provides a quick and easy way to
invite new people. However, unless this link is published somewhere for
rebels to find, it is impossible to find the group to join in the
conversation.
The Whatsapp communities feature improves discoverability of channels once a person is in that community, as all chats connected to one group can be connected together.
### Other information
Another issue with WhatsApp is that many people use it to speak to
friends and family. Having XR-related chats on the same platform can put
unnecessary stress on rebels who might want to temporarily 'switch off'
XR communications in order to avoid burnout.