"Use WhatsApp on your phone to see older chat messages."

Seriously?

A very large share of WhatsApp users are office workers or students. We log in from the computer and keep the session open for long periods of time, even most of the day, while working or doing other things. Therefore, we RELY on the browser or desktop versions of WhatsApp to be capable of displaying exactly what can be displayed in the phone app. Part of that is being able to access the full message history of every chat.

Since the latest WhatsApp update (as of April 2022), this is no longer possible to full extent.

WhatsApp's new multi-device synchronization allows multiple devices apart from the cell phone to be logged in and have an active session with the same account at the same time. The drawback is that it loads only the most recent messages from each chat. Some chats seem to load only a specific amount of days worth of messages, but there seems to be a limit to the total amount of messages a chat can load as well.

In any case, this limitation renders WhatsApp Web practically useless for certain purposes we gave to it. Many of us have a "personal group chat", which we use to store notes, voice notes and multimedia to save them for later. Sometimes, we need or prefer to revisit those personal notes on a computer, especially voice notes related to work or study. In addition, it's not infrequent to need to download images, videos or voice messages directly to the computer, or to copy text messages to paste them somewhere. In group chats with lots of messages and content uploading, it's also important that all the members are able to retrieve any important message or file that was sent since they joined. In fact, this can be said about any individual chat: being able to retrieve old content is as important on a computer as it is on a phone.

How are we able to stay productive while working on a computer, if we're now forced to have to go to our phones to check old content and find complex workarounds to sent that old content to our computers?

It doesn't make any sense. We think you at Meta are aware it doesn't make sense. WhatsApp has recently been integrating some of the functions that gave Telegram the upper hand when it comes to versatility. But this new limitation is so monumentally uncalled for such a huge fraction of your target audience, that could make you, WhatsApp, start to lose the race.

Hope you can fix this issue that can't be described but as a capital usability flaw.

Respectfully,

Lots of people