Exploring User's Perception of Storage Management Features in Instant Messaging Applications: A Case on WhatsApp Messenger

With the rapid increase in the use of mobile devices, many users use mobile instant messaging (IM) services as a way to easily communicate and connect with friends, family members, and others. Instant messaging (IM) applications provide several services such as chatting, voice calls, video calls and multimedia sharing. They are deployed with many features that aim to improve the quality of experience (QoE) for users of such services. However, the storage usage of IM applications may negatively impact the storage space of mobile devices in an unexpected way and degrade its performance. Some IM applications, such as WhatsApp, have some features and options to manage the storage usage but they are not fully visible or effective. Thus, this paper aims to explore and understand user's perception of storage related features in IM applications. We conduct a user study by considering WhatsApp application as a case study due to its popularity among other IM applications. We present a survey of 257 WhatsApp Saudi users to determine their behavior and understanding of storage related features and to identify factors that impact the storage usage of IM applications. Our results show a significant impact of duplicate and unwanted content on the storage space of WhatsApp. The results show that 56.6% of participants misunderstood the functionality of the auto-download feature and 55% of participants were not aware of the existing of storage management features. We believe that our findings will have a potential role in making better design decisions to improve the usability of storage-related features provided in several IM applications.