Definately spying on you for the NSA/CIA/GCHQ. Quite funny when someone posts a thread about a Chinese phone, someone always pipes up with hidden Chinese spyware, but they are quite happy with Microsoft NSA/CIA/GCHQ spyware on their laptops, desktops, mobiles and tablets!
Wrong, Wrong, WRONG, WRONG and WRONG again. Do Micro$oft pay you to spread their propaganda for them or do you just do it for fun? You do realise that Mac is a PC too? PERSONAL COMPUTER, is it yours? is it a computer? Then it's a PC, idiot. The term comes from a computer that isn't a mainframe and isn't a dumb terminal, your terminology is out of date and your interpretation of it isn't accurate. If you have a "smartphone", that's a PC. Given that fact, Windows certainly does not run on "90%+" of PCs. Are you actually refering to an "IBM Compatible PC"? Your terminology is still several decades out of date. Or maybe you mean the x86 Architecture? They still can run Linux, BSD, Unix, Android, Chrome OS and many other operating systems, even Windows if you're too dumb to use a real OS. Isn't OSX able to run on x86 now too? I don't really care about dumb people who do dumb things and can't handle their own security as far as I'm concerned, the Internet would be better off without these egotistical losers with their "look at me! look at me!" attitudes posting about their boring, standard issue lives every 5 minutes. If I wanted to discuss anything sensitive then I would encrypt the text myself and send it within their protocol or any other protocol to be decrypted at the other end by the recipient. Sure, it's nice if they encrypt their protocol too but since we don't have the source code, we don't know how secure that is. I'll stick to IRC, have Telegram within my IRC client and ignore the handful of people that I know who insist on using WhatsApp since there's no suitable client for me. They're not annoyed with you, dream on. They're not really watching you, they merely have to provide the idea that they could be watching you at any time, it's the Panopticon effect. In reality...ever tried to work on government contracts? Government employees are the most lazy and incompetent individuals that you could come accross, they're not capable of carrying out this mass surveilance. I'm pretty sure Snowden is still on the payroll too, it's all a deception. Corporations on the other hand are spying on you, for profit, YOU are their product, they are monetising you. I don't want to "dilute" it, it would be nice to be able to use it from Pidgin when I choose to be on a graphical desktop or Weechat when I'm in a terminal because all of my other IM accounts can be used through those via libpurple. The phone app would be a nice touch for those odd occasions where it might be useful to me. These companies should look at libpurple and similar projects, all of the hard work has been done for them, there's no need to re-invent the wheel. It's about choice, there's only two options with software - Either the user controls the software or the software controls the user. Which do you want?
It is Facebook's company. They can do with it whatever they wish. Personally, I can fully see why Facebook are trying to protect the WhatsApp brand. It doesn't need to be diluted into being whatever you want it to be.
There are many operating systems that *can* run on a PC...but there's only one that actually runs on 90%+ of all PC's. So instead of being facetious, why don't you just take it as read that when someone says 'PC', they mean 'Windows' ;) Also, I remember a while back that Snapchat got into privacy troubles because of third party apps that were using outdated (or non-existent) security on their clients. Snapchat therefore forced every third party client to close. With that in mind, why should WhatsApp take the risk and allow others to create their own versions of the app when it can clearly bring in security issues? If you want Telegram, go and chat to the handful of people that you know who are on there. For the rest of us, WhatsApp is the de facto option because it is where everyone else is. It also has end to end encryption (much to the annoyance of the US authorities)
The English language is quite limited when it comes to the word Free, there is free as in freedom and free as in free stuff, some will say libre and gratis so that you understand the two, they don't always go together. People have made free (gratis and libre) third party clients that this malicious company have ensured can no longer continue to be released despite other people having done work for them. We don't all want a phone app, some of us want a desktop or even command line program to communicate with people. Many of us want to integrate with existing messaging programs such as Pidgin or bitlbee so that all of our instant messaging is handled by one program, this company want to remove our freedom to do that, maybe there's something wrong with them.