First thing I thought after reading the headline was "another windows user complaining about updates" and i think that's just how it is after reading the whole article. The author shows up some problematic points of the development of handling updates. But if he spend the time thinking about these problems in actively doing something about it, there only would be a few things left to complain about.
I'm sure there are some services that are not replaceable and use update methods like mentioned in the article. But this doesn't happens by accident. If the developes of a service choose such update methods, either it's likely that you can see some other problematic decisions the developers made, or the old service you are trying to run is not safe to run and has to be updated before it's safe to run.
As i notice such problematic decisions, I avoid these services or search for alternatives before I would complain about it, and this never happend.
I don't understand how the would try to make money with license this go other browsers. Preloading search results and an interface to swipe through it can by implemented in many ways. I don't think Firefox or Chrome will pay them for this.
"The researchers say that Open Whisper Systems, the non-profit that runs and maintains Signal, nonetheless responded to their work, saying that it's currently redesigning how Signal handles group messaging. Open Whisper Systems declined to comment on the record to WIRED about the Ruhr researchers' findings."
"In a phone call with WIRED, a WhatsApp spokesperson confirmed the researchers' findings. [...]And the WhatsApp spokesperson also noted that preventing the Ruhr University researchers' attack would likely break a popular WhatsApp feature that allows anyone to join a group simply by clicking on a URL."
So I don't think WhatsApp will fix it.
Do you really think WhatsApp doesn't work on phones like Jio because WhatsApp doesnt has enough capabilitys to support it ? WhatsApp actively blocks phone models that doesn't fit in their needs. WhatsApps first priority is blocking chat-/spambots, because they are only making money with selling access for companies. To enchant the bot detection, the WhatsApp API needs to get more and more complex. If a older or cheaper phone doesn't support the complex API anymore, botblocking is more important than backwards compability. It follows that great tools like the Matrix bridge never will working with WhatsApp.