Viber is by far, the worst app that I've had the misfortune to ever use, and I hate the part that I have to because some people still use it to communicate.
Everything in its design is atrocious to me.
I’m pretty darn sure that Viber is among the first chat apps out there that started the whole idea of having your mobile number as your primary login, and it uses that alongside your contacts list and their internal database of phone numbers to broadcast to everyone that you’re using their service.
I hate this shit on ANY app, not just Viber. But to me, Viber’s the one that started this, and then apps like WhatsApp or Telegram followed along. Either way, it’s a terrible “pattern” that’s prevalent in messaging apps because they want to grow their echo chambers and to boost engagement and shit.
So obnoxious.
The thing that really irks me about Viber is its ad-first mentality. If you thought the popular services nowadays are becoming too obnoxious with their upsells and advertising dark patterns, Viber is the most blatant implementation of them all.
Everyone refers to unsolicited messages as things you’re meant to report and treat as spam.
Some of the many notifications you’ll get from Viber’s spam network. Unsolicited spam, treated as “conversations”.
Viber’s atrocious design ethos: bombarding you with so much of their attempts to get you engaged. Reminds me of a certain shopping up here in Southeast Asia 🙄
Notification channel abuse, because they want you to see ads even if you decided to revoke the main notifications channel. I killed all notifications privileges after this shit.
Viber? Fuck you, we call it your “Business Inbox” and pin that shit on top of your inbox and they get separate high priority channels on your Notifications settings.
The app even greets you with their bot channels first, then sandwiches your actual conversations with their shitty Business Inbox and you can’t even report these as spam — you have to tap one…two… three taps to get to the “business” contact to “uncheck” Receive messages. Good luck if you receive more spam from businesses, because you’ll have to do the same shit, and you cannot remove this annoying Business Inbox on your message list.
It’s so bad, I just revoked their notification privileges entirely. I’ll just check the app whenever I actually need it.
The other thing that sticks to me with Viber that I can no longer confirm because I’m tired of dealing with one of its annoying behaviors in its heyday — it reminds you of notifications you’ve dismissed.
Every other app behaves normally: you get a message, you get a notification toast. Dismiss it and you’re good.
Viber? You get the same, but after some indeterminate amount of time, you’ll get that same notification again and in some cases, it even beeps WHILE you’ve just dismissed a message.
What the heck? This shit should be a toggle you have to opt-in, not default behavior.
Hell, a ton of shit in this app should be opt-in, but their opinionated garbage design is generally on by default, and good luck if you can choose to opt-out or if they’ll bother you about it endlessly.