[rikafurude21]

Recently bought an apple watch for my mom and got it set up with her iphone. Almost instantly she notices that she cant accept WhatsApp calls on her watch, and after looking into it I found out that it was another one of those apple things where they assume youre obviously using facetime so that functionality isnt available for any other app. For context, in europe Whatsapp is the dominating messaging app and alot of people use it for calling as well as messaging. The apple watch is, as far as I can tell, a simple Bluetooth wearable with a speaker and a microphone, so the only reason its like this is that apple has a concept of how the device is "supposed" to be used and only lets you use it that way. After that experience I fully support all the regulations the EU is putting on apple to open up.

[dijit]

You can accept calls on the watch from Telegram.

So this sounds like a “whatsapp didn’t want to do it” more than a “Apple disallowed it”

[mbirth]

Most probably. WhatsApp is also still using the old way of accessing photos where you have to define which photos WA has access to every time you want to share newly taken photos. I’m pretty sure they do that deliberately so you get annoyed and give them blanket access to all your photos. (Which they then probably secretly analyse in the background.)

[AnonC]

Seems like you’d just need to set WhatsApp as the default calling app on iOS and make sure to install WhatsApp on the watch too. The ability to set another app as the default for calls has been around since early this year. Doesn’t this work?

[aprilnya]

Huh, with CallKit’s existence I would have assumed any app using CallKit would work on Watch…

[wltr]

I was genuinely sure it’s not a problem, as I personally know quite a few people who do that. But I think they use either FaceTime or regular cellular. That’s sure weird a simple call does work in iPhone 4S (imagine a price for it in 2026), but doesn’t on modern Apple Watch Ultra, which is quite expensive.

[stefandesu]

Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. Third-party app calls don't go to the Watch. It's so annoying, I have to tell people to call me using regular phone calls or FaceTime instead of using Signal or WhatsApp because I always miss the latter ones.

[inkyoto]

WhatsApp did not have a dedicated Watch app until 1 or 2 months ago – it was not even possible to respond to WhatsApp messages on the Watch, only seeing the mirrored notifications was possible.

You can blame Apple for other things if that is the intention, but this particular one was a decision made by Meta and by Meta only.

Write to your regulator and make a complaint that Meta is keeping the WhatsApp stage gate.