Hello,
I hope this topic hasn‘t been addressed before, but I searched for a long time and couldn‘t find anything for my specific issues.
First of all, I‘m aware that achieving good privacy while using a product like WhatsApp is kind of impossible. But I still think it‘s better to use it in GOS than on a regular android phone. I want to keep using it because my social life is more important to me and I would loose contact to many people without this app.
I encountered some issues though and I‘m not sure if they need to be addressed by the app developers (then they probably won‘t and I just have to live with them) or if they can be fixed by the operating system or even me as the user.
The first issue that I encountered is, that during audio calls, once I put the app in the background or lock the phone, my microphone stops working and the other person is unable to hear me. The call doesn‘t end or anything, it‘s just my microphone that‘s not working. As soon as I put the app back into the foreground, my microphone works again and the other person is able to hear me again. I tried to fix this by giving the app permission to run in the background unconditionally but it didn‘t fix the issue and even if it did, I feel like it wouldn‘t be a good solution since this is not a permission that I want to give an app like WhatsApp. Rather I think the call should be handled by the operating system and the microphone access shouldn‘t even be necessary for the app during the call, since it already has the permission to initiate calls. (Just like notifications are handled by the operating system and the app doesn‘t need permission to run in the background to be able to present notifications.) For now, I have no way to fix this and need to keep the app open and active at all times during audio calls. It doesn‘t seem to be the case during video calls though, in that case the app will use the „picture-in-picture“ feature to stay open in a small window on the screen and the microphone seems to keep working even if the phone is locked. I‘m not entirely certain about this though and need to do further testing.
My second issue is also kind of related to this. And that is, the app keeps running in the background and if given permission, using the microphone all the time, eventhough I have completely disallowed it to run in the background at all. In the settings battery overview, I can see that WhatsApp has a background running time of over 18 hours since the last complete charge. I‘m not sure what exactly this number means though. All I know is, it shouldn‘t be able to run in the background. Also, for example yesterday evening I ended a call and went to bed. This morning, over 8 hours after ending the call and locking the phone, I see that the app is still using the microphone. I can only stop this microphone access by completely disabling microphone access in the operating system. Forcing the app to close doesn’t change it. I give the App microphone access for one time only, when I make a call or record a voice message, it doesn‘t have permanent permission to access it. So I feel like it shouldn‘t be able to still use the microphone over 8 hours after the call has ended. If Meta collects data this way (aside from this possibly being a clear breach of GDPR and whatnot), so assuming this is not a bug but intended behaviour, a possible solution could be to implement something like timed single-use permissions. For example, something like „give access to the microphone for the next 3 hours“.
Maybe someone else has noticed similar things or experienced similar issues and found a solution already?
Thanks! :)