Dual Whatsapp

I'd be shocked if the WhatsApp developers aren't aware of the new iPhone dual-SIM capability. They already support dual-SIM Android phones though an Android feature that allows multiple instances of the identical app to be installed (it's called Parallel Apps). iOS doesn't have this.

It would seem that there are two ways to go about this: (1) force every app developer who might be affected to figure out something on their own. Necessarily, this would be a huge mess, not to mention wasteful. (2) Do it the way Android has done it: provide a multiple-app-instance capability. What this does, internally, is make more than one data- and cache-space available to an app.

So we'll have to wait and see if Apple decides to adopt what seems like a reasonable idea from Android, whether they'll do something different (but better, of course) with similar result, or whether they'll do nothing and leave WhatsApp customers hanging until WhatsApp decides whether it's worth doing a unique implementation.

The other "solutions" that are floating around are workarounds that don't come from either Apple or WhatsApp.

Already left feedback. It may not be such a small number - many apps are tied to the phone number, and when you have two phone numbers, you might appreciate being able to use the app with both of them. All of the ridesharing apps, for example (ok, that doesn't count for more than a couple dozen, but still). Admitted it's a tiny fraction of all of the apps on the App Store, but most of them are not trivial apps, they're apps for which some people (myself, for example) have put up with using an Android just so that we could have the app fully supported.

If Apple went to the trouble to make a dual-SIM phone (because the number of customers in Asia and other countries where dual-SIM is common is enormous), then they understand what that market wants and needs. I wouldn't assume, from a US-centric point of view, that they aren't throwing away a significant market by ignoring stuff like full support for dual-SIM phones. A lot of interesting stuff happens out there in the world where more people own iPhones than in the US. Apple is not ignorant of that, but they were pretty late to the game with dual-SIM, and they're still catching up.

Here's a timely OpEd piece on a bit of why Apple is having trouble in China. It's not all due to a slowing economy. Apple was slow to meet the needs of the enormous Asian market.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/05/opinion/sunday/apple-china.html

A bit of attention to the needs of dual-SIM customers wouldn't hurt. I suspect that Apple is paying attention right now.

Unfortunately Apple hasn’t gotten their mind around this ahead of the industry standards. They’ve launched an iPhone with Dual SIM support, but not Dual Apps.

I’d hoped that Apple would acquire Telegram, but sadly that would never be the case.

I don't believe that Telegram was ever for sale. It's a somewhat mysterious LLC that is still privately held, as far as I know. And if Apple wanted to offer a multi-platform encrypting messaging app, they'd probably do it themselves. Who knows, maybe they will.

In any case, my personal belief is that Apple will, eventually, address the situation of apps that need to be able to use more than one phone number, with a fairly good architecture that will be different and, in some ways, probably better than what Android has. Good architectures aren't invented in a couple of weeks, and they have plenty of other stuff to keep them busy, so I don't think we can expect to see this in the next couple of months. But what's clear is that Apple has finally realized that they're getting killed in Asia (especially China and India) and need to do something.

As I had said in the past, app developers can probably do something on their own, but it's a bad plan, especially if Apple eventually provides a way to do it. And as others have said, there are a couple of solutions out there, although I don't have much faith that they're good solutions. But I haven't tried them, so shouldn't really say anything bad about them.

Contact the developers of the app and ask them if they plan to add support for two numbers

Unlikely that iOS will change for what would only be required for a very small number of apps, though obviously you can try leaving feedback to Apple about it