WhatsApp Review 2026: The App I Set Up on My Mom's Phone (and Everyone Else's)

Last Diwali, I finally did what I had been putting off for two years: I sat down with my mother and helped her set up WhatsApp on her new phone. She had been using it on her old phone -- barely -- mostly just opening messages my sister sent and occasionally replying with a single word. The new phone meant starting fresh, and she looked at me with that particular mix of determination and dread that parents reserve for technology they know they need but do not trust.

We spent about forty minutes together. By the end, she could send messages, share photos from her gallery, make a video call to my sister in Bangalore, and send a voice message (her favorite discovery -- "I can just talk instead of typing?!"). Watching her face when the video call connected and she could see her grandchildren in real time was one of those moments that reminds you what technology is actually for.

I am sharing this because I think it is the most honest way to review WhatsApp. This is not a tool for power users or tech enthusiasts. It is a utility. It is the app that connects 2.7 billion people to the humans they care about. And reviewing it means talking about how real people actually use it, not listing specs.

Getting Started: What to Do First

If you are helping someone set up WhatsApp for the first time -- or setting it up yourself -- here is exactly what the process looks like in 2026.

Download it from the App Store or Play Store. Open it. Enter your phone number. WhatsApp sends a verification code via SMS; it usually auto-detects the code so you do not even need to type it. Pick a profile name and optionally a profile photo. That is it. You are in.

WhatsApp immediately scans your phone contacts and shows you which of them are already on WhatsApp. This is the single most important design decision in the entire app. There is no "add friend by username" step, no "search for people" step, no invitation process. If someone's number is in your phone and they use WhatsApp, they appear automatically. My mom's contact list populated instantly with about 40 people she knew, and she said "oh, everyone is here already!" -- which is precisely the experience WhatsApp is designed to create.

One thing to set up right away: go to Settings, then Privacy, and review who can see your profile photo, last seen, and about. I always recommend setting these to "My Contacts" rather than "Everyone" -- it is a small privacy step that most people skip but should not.

Messaging: The Part Everyone Uses

Text messaging in WhatsApp is fast and reliable. I have been using it daily for about eight years now, and I can count on one hand the number of times a message failed to deliver when I had an internet connection. That reliability sounds boring, but it is the entire reason WhatsApp became the default in so many countries. It just works.

Here are the features you will actually use in daily messaging, explained through how my family uses them:

Voice messages are, in my experience, the single most popular feature among people over 50. My mom sends voice messages for everything now. She records a two-minute update about her day, talks about what she cooked, asks how work is going. She finds it easier than typing, and frankly, hearing her voice makes the messages feel warmer than text ever could. You record by holding the microphone button, and you can play messages at 1x, 1.5x, or 2x speed, which is useful when an uncle sends a five-minute voice message that could have been a sentence.

Photo and video sharing works well for everyday use. You can share from your gallery or take a photo directly in the app. The quality has improved -- HD sharing is now the default, which means the photos actually look decent when you save them. For my family, the most common use is sharing pictures of food (my mom), grandchildren (my sister), and random things from work (me). You can also send photos that can only be viewed once -- useful for sharing something like a boarding pass or document where you do not want it sitting in someone's chat history forever.

Message reactions save a lot of unnecessary replies. Instead of typing "haha" or "nice" or "ok," you can react with an emoji. This is one of those small features that subtly reduces the noise in group chats. My family group chat used to be 40% "ok" and "nice" messages. Now those are just emoji reactions on the original message, and the chat is easier to follow.

Message editing lets you fix a message within 15 minutes of sending it. I use this more often than I expected, usually to fix embarrassing autocorrect mistakes before anyone notices.

Video and Voice Calls: Staying Connected Across Distance

My sister lives in Bangalore. My parents are in Hyderabad. I am in Delhi. WhatsApp video calls are how we see each other between visits. Sunday evening calls are a ritual now -- my parents call my sister, I join, and we spend twenty minutes catching up while the kids show us their drawings or their new toys.

The call quality is genuinely good, even on my parents' home WiFi, which is not the fastest. WhatsApp seems to handle poor connections better than most apps -- instead of dropping the call entirely, it degrades the video quality gracefully and keeps the audio clear. This is exactly the right priority for a family call. I do not need to see my mom in 4K; I need to hear her voice without cutting out.

Group video calls support up to 32 people, which is more than enough for family use. During last year's Holi celebration, we had twelve family members on a single call from four different cities. It worked. Not perfectly -- there was some lag, and one uncle's video froze for a bit -- but it worked well enough that everyone was laughing together and having a good time.

For international calls, WhatsApp is essentially free long-distance. My cousin in Dubai, my aunt in the US, my friend in London -- all of them are a free call away as long as both sides have internet. This alone makes WhatsApp invaluable for anyone with family spread across the world, which describes a very large percentage of Indian families.

Groups and Communities: Managing the Chaos

If you have an Indian family, you know about WhatsApp groups. You probably have too many of them. The "Family (Main)" group, the "Family (Extended)" group, the "School Parents" group, the "Society Maintenance" group, the "College Friends" group, and at least three groups that nobody remembers creating but nobody wants to leave.

Groups work well for what they are. You can have up to 1,024 members, and admins can control who can post, who can edit the group info, and whether members can add other members. Polls are surprisingly useful for making group decisions -- "Where should we eat for Dad's birthday?" with five restaurant options gets a faster answer than an open-ended discussion that goes nowhere.

Communities are the newer addition, and they solve a real problem. Think of a Community as a folder that holds related groups. For example, our apartment complex Community contains separate groups for maintenance issues, events, marketplace (buying/selling), and general discussion. There is also an announcement channel that reaches everyone. Before Communities, these were five unrelated groups that new residents had to be added to one by one. Now there is one Community link that gives you access to everything.

The honest limitation: group management is still basic compared to Telegram. There are no topics within groups (so conversations in busy groups become impossible to follow), no slow mode to limit spam, and no granular roles beyond admin and member. If you manage a large community, Telegram is still the better tool. For family and neighborhood groups, WhatsApp is fine.

Privacy: What You Should Know and What to Set Up

WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption for all personal messages and calls. This means that nobody -- not WhatsApp, not Meta, not your internet provider -- can read your messages except you and the person you are talking to. This is good, and it is on by default, which means you do not need to do anything special to get it.

However, there is a but, and it is worth understanding. While the content of your messages is encrypted, Meta (WhatsApp's parent company) does collect metadata. That means they know who you talk to, how often, when, and from where. They know your device information and usage patterns. They do not know what you said, but they know a lot about the patterns of your communication. Whether this bothers you depends on your personal comfort level with Meta as a company.

Here are the privacy settings I recommend adjusting right after setup:

Turn on encrypted backups. Go to Settings, then Chats, then Chat Backup, then End-to-end Encrypted Backup. Set a password you will not forget. This protects your chat history on Google Drive or iCloud from being read by anyone but you. Without this, your backup is stored unencrypted, which is a gap most people do not know about.

Turn on two-step verification. This adds a PIN that is required if someone tries to register your phone number on a new device. It protects you from account hijacking, which does happen.

Turn on "Silence Unknown Callers." This automatically silences calls from numbers not in your contacts. It will not block them -- they can still leave a voicemail -- but you will not be interrupted by spam calls, which have gotten worse on WhatsApp over the past year.

Using WhatsApp on Your Computer

If you spend your workday at a computer, WhatsApp's desktop and web apps let you message from your keyboard. Here is how to set it up.

For the web version: go to web.whatsapp.com in your browser. Open WhatsApp on your phone, go to Settings (or the three-dot menu on Android), tap Linked Devices, and scan the QR code on the screen. Your chats sync to the browser in about 10 seconds.

For the desktop app: download it from the Microsoft Store, Mac App Store, or whatsapp.com. Same linking process.

The good news: multi-device support now works independently, meaning your phone does not need to be connected to the internet for the desktop app to work. You can link up to four devices. The messages sync across all of them.

The honest limitation: the desktop experience feels like a simplified version of the mobile app. Some features are missing or less polished. Voice calls work but video calls are basic. The Status tab is there but feels like an afterthought. If you primarily use WhatsApp for text messaging, the desktop app is very useful. If you use it for calls and media, the phone is still the better experience.

WhatsApp for Small Businesses: A Quick Guide

If you run a small business -- a shop, a restaurant, a service -- the WhatsApp Business app is worth knowing about. It is a separate, free app that lets you create a business profile with your address, hours, website, and product catalog.

The most useful feature for small businesses is the product catalog. You can upload photos of your products with descriptions and prices, and customers can browse them directly in the chat. I helped a friend who runs a bakery set this up, and she went from fielding individual "what cakes do you have?" messages to sending a catalog link that answers the question before it is asked. She says it saves her about an hour a day.

Quick replies let you save commonly sent messages and send them with a shortcut. Automated greeting messages send a welcome message when someone contacts you for the first time. Away messages respond automatically outside of business hours. These features are simple but effective for solo operators and small teams.

What WhatsApp Still Gets Wrong

No username system. To message someone on WhatsApp, you need their phone number. This means every new business contact, every person you meet at an event, every online interaction requires sharing your personal phone number. Telegram solved this years ago with usernames. Signal has them now too. WhatsApp still requires your number, and in a world where privacy matters, this feels outdated.

No scheduled messages. I cannot schedule a birthday wish to send at midnight or a reminder to send to a group at 9am on Monday. This is such a basic feature that its absence is baffling.

No chat folders. If you are in twenty groups and have active conversations with fifty people, your chat list is a wall of text. Telegram has folders to organize chats by category. WhatsApp has... pinning up to three chats to the top. That is it.

Media compression. Despite the HD sharing improvements, WhatsApp still compresses images and videos. If you send a high-resolution photo, it arrives slightly degraded. For everyday use this is fine. For sharing professional photos or important documents, use email or a cloud sharing link.

Compared to the Alternatives

Telegram is the more powerful app. Better groups, better channels, better file sharing, more customization, cloud storage for your messages. If you are choosing based on features alone, Telegram wins. But features do not matter if the people you want to talk to are not on the platform. And in most of the world, they are on WhatsApp.

Signal is the more private app. It collects almost no data about you. If privacy is your top concern and you can convince your contacts to switch, Signal is the better choice. For most people, that "convince your contacts" part is the dealbreaker.

iMessage works beautifully within the Apple ecosystem. If everyone you communicate with has an iPhone, iMessage is arguably a better experience. But the moment someone in the conversation has an Android phone, iMessage falls apart. WhatsApp does not care what phone you have.

My Recommendation: Who Should Use WhatsApp and How