Regarding negative social consequences ... Today I switched phones and wanted to transfer my Whatsapp contacts to the new phone. What Whatsapp did: Somehow they managed to delete me from each and every group I had been in, deleted every chat and I cannot access this anymore.
I already had to explain to three friends why I left our group as they were furious because we had talked about important things in those groups.
Just to say this didn't happen with Telegram. Recovered everything smoothly with no errors.
This happens because whatsapp stores all the information in your phone itself. On the server side, at least before FB bought it, they didn't store your info. this is the reason their team was so small despite the billion users, because they just need to store data on a need basis, since they were a paid messenger.
The moment you switch phones, all the data is lost, because they do not have it in the cloud! This is the reason your phone needs to be connected to Internet when using whatsapp web or whatsapp desktop, because they literally stream your data i.e. chats from phone to desktop!
Telegram is a cloud messenger, data is stored in the cloud and loaded everytime in your devices, ironically this makes whatsapp better than telegram :D at least before facebook bought it.
Well... I did, at least I thought so. I had it on "weekly" but am not able to recover it. Doesn't matter, just wanted to make the point that I'm in favor of adapting a new messaging up not as widely used as WhatsApp.
I didn't say you can't, I said Whatsapp doesn't store it. I meant to say that it won't automatically backup and restore your stuff when you change phones.
You have to backup the data yourself in an sd card or a cloud service that you choose. It isn't stored in Facebook's servers.
Just to say this didn't happen with Telegram. Recovered everything smoothly with no errors.