In recent weeks, the team behind the popular messenger WhatsApp have been aggressively pushing out updates for Windows Phone, including a somewhat major overhaul of behind the scenes plumbing. But if there was one area where people always had complaints about the app, it was with its notification system not working reliably.
We’ll spare you the details of why notifications sometimes fail on Windows Phone, but we can say that things are at least improving. In fact, the Nokia team working with WhatsApp to develop the service has certainly been a positive influence on the app, making it more dependable.
That’s why it’s curious to see this message below, tipped to us by @SQLvariant, that pops up if your system notifications aren’t set up properly (or jammed, to use more common vernacular). We’ve seen a few people report on this phenomenon elsewhere and it does seem accurate: if you see that message, your WhatsApp notification may not work, so reboot the phone and it should fix things.
Interestingly, @SQLvariant notes that while it does work well, it doesn’t play too nice with Data Sense. For those who don’t know, Data Sense is an optional, carrier dependent service that allows users to track in real-time their data usage, cellular and Wi-Fi, so as to better manage things. One feature of Data Sense is that as you approach your allocated data usage, you can have the device throttle your usage, so as to prevent overage charges from your carrier.
So in this case, Data Sense purposefully disabled the background agent for WhatsApp to save data, meaning this was a false report by the app. Still, considering where the app was a few months ago, we’ll take this “alert” any day so that we know we’ll never miss a WhatsApp message. Kind of cool, right?
You can download WhatsApp from the Windows Phone by following this link. Thanks, @SQLvariant, for the tip
