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I am an active user of WhatsApp and their service is much more reliable than Skype or Hangouts. There's a reason why 800 million people are using it and it's not only because of network effects, it's because the base product and service is rock solid.

Their innovation is evolution of WhatsApp past text messages. And in the end, nothing is a true innovation -- most things build on past ideas.

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"Reliable" is a relative term for WA. Everybody I know has a random delay in messages, the browser "thing" is mostly not usable, no desktop app, etc. You can not use WA for productivity.

but productivity never was it's intended target - skype was killed on mobile because of shitty notification requiring the app to be on for the longest time, call dropping, software block to 3g calls.

basically they shot themselves in the foot on the mobile market with an half assed implementation, and even today the notification system on skype mobile apps is dumb, especially how they handles balloons (the only app that could do worse on notification balloons is facebook)

whatsapp may not be a cornerstone of reliability, but it has an incredibly frictionless mobile user experience.

I bought an Ubuntu phone, and here its the netwok effect that stops my friends switching to Telegram or anything else.

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