No, you can't, at least not reliably. Reverse engineering is nowhere near as simple as "just like someone can read the code".
sure, but someone would find out if WhatsApp didn't e2ee their messages, which is the most important thing
If I could be certain that the messages are in fact encrypted as claimed, I'd agree.
Well you literally can be, because if it was not someone would find out instantly, it'd be a huge thing and meta would suffer greatly if they lied about e2ee
They do, just not in the way you probably think. Unique identifiers (which phone numbers typically are) can always be used to track users, even if they're just stored as a hash value on a server. They don't immediately reveal the identity of a person like clear text phone numbers could do, but there's still information that can be extracted through metadata analysis. Though to be fair, this discussion is more relevant to anonymity than to privacy.
Sealed sender...., also signal is private, not anonymous, if you want both, simplex is ur friend
Why would it be pointless? If some random person broke into your home, would you just open all the doors because apparently doors are pointless?
well that's not the same situation the robber wouldn't see everything, the hw component would.... also other doors have the function of keeping heat inside, not keeping robbers away
Not really, as any unwanted traffic to WhatsApp's servers would just get drowned within wanted traffic, making it effectively unnoticeable to the user. The same can't be said for hardware that tries to connect somewhere despite no software on that device being allowed to connect to the internet.
Well again if it did something like that, we would know thanks ro reverse engineering