I met a consultant behind WhatsApp web in Dubai
In Dubai, I met a tech advisor consulting Meta on WhatsApp Web. Our conversations revealed the deeper layers of connection in a disconnected world.
When I met him, he was in Dubai for a short advisory role consulting with engineers working on WhatsApp Web at Meta. It wasn’t unusual for him. As a freelance technology advisor, he was often brought in when products needed structural clarity or when updates were hitting performance walls. He described his work in simple terms: “They call when something stops making sense.”
We first spoke at a quiet lounge in DIFC. I noticed him not for how he looked, but how still he was. In a city obsessed with noise, he carried none. He had a laptop open, fingers tapping slowly, methodically, with the kind of precision that made me curious enough to ask what he was working on.
“Helping Meta stabilise a cross-device rollout for WhatsApp Web,” he said plainly.
At the time, Meta had already introduced multi-device support, allowing users to use WhatsApp Web without keeping their phones connected. It was a technical leap from previous versions, which mirrored a phone session in real-time and required constant Bluetooth or internet proximity. Now, each device held its own set of encrypted keys and operated independently, while syncing conversations through Meta’s servers. But independence, he explained, comes with trade-offs.
“Disconnection is never really clean,” he said. “Even when the phone isn’t needed anymore, the system is still checking for consistency. You can close the app, but part of the conversation still lives elsewhere.”
We saw each other again the next day, and then several times after that. He worked in the evenings, mostly from his hotel suite debugging session stability issues and reviewing how message delivery times varied across devices in low connectivity regions. His world was filled with terms I didn’t fully grasp: handshake protocols, WebSocket persistence, local encryption fallback. But there was something calming in the way he moved through complexity.
He didn’t ask much about me. Not because he wasn’t curious, but because he never assumed there was something he had to know. He listened more than he spoke, and when he did speak, it was rarely about himself. His focus remained on his work, though over time, our conversations began to shift from code to people.
He said the biggest challenges weren’t technical, they were human. “Systems break when people push them to be things they were never meant to be. And the hardest part is convincing them that simpler is better.”
On his final night in Dubai, he showed me an internal test build: faster, less cluttered, and in his words “calmer.” He’d pushed for the removal of certain interface animations, reduced memory drain, and had even flagged a long standing sync delay issue in group conversations.
When I asked him if it ever felt lonely, moving from system to system, country to country, he shrugged.
“Not really. I get to leave before things become complicated. It’s a luxury.”
He left quietly the next morning. No ceremony. No extended goodbyes. Just a final nod before stepping into the car.
He reminded me that sometimes the cleanest form of connection is knowing when and how to let go.