What I do not understand is how has AOL Messenger, MSN Messenger, Skype, ICQ, and Google Chat all managed to be displaced by Whatsapp? I guess it is loss of 'business focus', but the idea of a "messenging app" is incredibly simple, so one would think it would be simple enough to do.
Right but WhatsApp solved a very different problem in the beginning - how do I send a message to someone who isn't online right now (or has a flaky connection).
THAT was what was needed for mobile devices. I remember trying to use MSN messenger when I was on WAP and it sucked. And then I remember Skype on iPhone sucked for messages too. SMS also wasn't great if you were remotely international and had friends and family not in the same country as you.
It took two whole years for Skype to rearchitect away from peer to peer (understandably so).
To this day, when you want guaranteed delivery, in order and without duplicates WhatsApp runs circles around its competitors.
Compare that with Slack which both on desktop and mobile regularly has weird issues with successfully delivering a message.
Ultimately avatars are nice to have and later on top of a reliable messaging service but otherwise I'd take boring old text over flaky rich messaging every day of the week.
But WhatsApp is the Internet Explorer of messaging apps, only by supporting the alternatives like Telegram we will have better messaging apps in the future.
Remember when IE had around 90% of market share 10 years ago? Well, the history repeats.
Some valid points there. The problem, for me at least and I guess many other people, is that the vast majority of my contacts uses WhatsApp.
I know this probably will never happen, but what I'd love to have is some kind of universal messaging app that connects to all services I want to use. Back in the late 90s there were plenty of internet messengers such as ICQ and Yahoo! Messenger, and IIRC it wasn't long before universal clients were developed.
It's funny how Google Talk and MSN were so much popular but weren't able to successfully transition to mobile and capture that market. WhatsApp is number one messaging app in the world right now and probably will stay for some time.
There were many messengers that ran on mobile phones in the old days (the days where text was pricey in many places on the world so you'd think people'd be extremely motivated to find an alternative to texting!) and none really caught on...
until whatsapp appeared on the scene. The key innovation whatsapp brought, because the app was laughably insecure and probably overly simple (but that simplicity can't have been the reason it won; there were other really simple apps out there)... was making your account ID equal to your phone number.
This gave whatsapp the ability to skip the phase of setting up your 'network'; there'd be no need to ask your friends what their ICQ id is or whatever. Whatsapp would even simply tell you which of your friends had whatsapp installed, immediately, without any consent or setting up your network required.
THAT sold. That simplicity. Yeah, you can (rightfully!) put quite a few question marks on the consent and authentication mechanism I laid out above, but it does lead to an app that is useful and understandable for a great many people (even if it is also not particularly secure or careful about your consent).
I'm sure all these messenger apps (signal, imessage, whatsapp, and telegram) know it and wouldn't dare walk away from phone numbers at this point.
WhatsApp itself started as an obscure chat application. They nailed the simple SMS-like experience without high SMS fees, and that was enough for mainstream users. No reason people won't jump ship when WhatsApp loses that core experience.
WhatsApp doesn’t provide anything messenger doesn’t. As far as I can tell, WhatsApp as a product reached its ‘market fit’ years and years ago, in that they stopped bothering trying to add anything to it. Real pity in some ways its not even slightly extensible
Whatsapp is indeed ubiquitous, but it is known that it's just another messenger platform - switching to alternatives wouldn't be particularly painful. In fact, switching back to one that is easier to eavesdrop on, would probably be considered a boon by the ruling classes.
The switch doesn't have to happen overnight, for all contacts and groups. And you can just run them next to each other.
People have just switched messengers in the past fine; ICQ -> MSN -> google chat / fb messenger (and I probably forgot a few). I agree that Whatsapp has become more "critical infrastructure" than messengers were, but don't give up right away because it seems impossible
WhatsApp didn't replace internet chatting. It replaced (or maybe I should say "disrupted") SMS, and perhaps more importantly, MMS. There are two reasons: it's free, and the UX is far superior in that it mimicks how humans, especially groups of humans, communicate.
I have no qualms using WhatsApp. It is a very efficient and useful app. They should probably merge messenger and WhatsApp (or maybe not lest they end up making WhatsApp bad too)
There are already several messaging applications that are much better than WhatsApp (Line or WeChat, to name a few without including the Big G), but people keep sticking to WhatsApp due to the network effect (it's what your friends have).
It's rather sad, given that with practically any other application (Line, WeChat, GTalk, Skype) you can talk via phone, tablet or PC, and with WhatsApp I have to message my friends with a tiny phone screen while my wonderful desktop keyboard and dual monitors sit there laughing at me.
At least with that one whatsapp's original idea switched from statuses to messaging because they saw the users using their ability to set statuses to message each other. That paired with awful SMS in most of the world let them dominate.
That's quite a different thing from what (I'm guessing Jan Koum?) is pitching here. So it'd be easier to not make the jump I think.
There is a reason why WhatsApp is still being used widely when there are better alternatives it's because people don't switch apps collectively at once.
That's a somewhat different use-case though because the alternative (text-messages) always had some sort of price tag, and iMessage wasn't around when WhatsApp started.
Changing messaging apps not the most convenient thing in the world, but it's not some kind of IT cataclysm. Plenty of WhatsApp competitors exist.
reply