I never had a big opinion on Meta products in general. They lost me when they deleted my old photos and albums on Facebook without asking me anything. I have been banging my head on WhatsApp Business API for the past few days as I have to integrate it into one of the projects. I haven't even reached their API documentation yet but the initial configuration part itself sucks.
One of the biggest hurdles that I have right now is the requirement that the client would want to continue using the WhatsApp Android Application and at the same time use WhatsApp for Business for sending bulk messages. But apparently, WhatsApp allows the usage of only one application. If we use Cloud API, we cannot use the Android client on our mobile. This is the hurdle that I'm trying to resolve now. I also had a look at some of the open source platforms that provide a user interface and at the same time bot features and bulk messaging features. But the look and feel of the WhatsApp application on mobile cannot be replaced with any other application.
I will continue exploring, but I don't know when I will be able to get a solution. The most annoying thing is that they are asking us to have a new number for the business. I don't understand why they cannot do this because it is a very common scenario that people will want to do normal chats with some users and also use the bulk messaging and other features of the business account. I would like to keep the history message saved too. If I want to have all these available to me, it is not very friendly to use the features available in the current API.
Some third-party applications provide a bulk messaging feature, but these third-party applications are a bit costly compared to the regular solution. It is not as good as having the Android application installed on the mobile and making use of that. Ultimately, it makes me feel that there are so many better chat applications available on Earth, and how on Earth did WhatsApp become very famous and unfortunately does not have any good flexibility.
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