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Comment by zeusk | Hacker News Reader

> 3. Very balanced outlook towards global users - even though SV (or even US) didn't recognize their traction, he always understood that there is a big world out there where not everyone has an iPhone.

This impressed me the most, because at the time whatsapp went mainstream globally - it was available on all platforms including the old BlackberryOS, BlackBerry 10, Symbian (S60), Windows Phone and even some candy phones!! which was unlike any other messaging platform and I have a good reason to believe it was instrumental in their success given how many of my friends switched to whatsapp just because everyone in the group could use it (we had WP, Android and iOS users and one oddball BB10 user [me]).

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And that is why they succeeded imo. Because Facebook bought Whatsapp for it's 1 Billion users, and Whatsapp would never have hit that mark had it not been for the fact that they focused on market outside the US (where cheaper phones with android, candybar and other OSes were more popular).

While Whatsapp is still not as big in the US, it's literally the defacto mode of communication in countries like India, Brazil etc. to the point where "Msg me" would automatically mean "Msg me on Whatsapp"

That + the fact that it was tied to your phone number was in my opinion genius. I for a thousand years would not have though too much about Global Market (because I'd be focused on revenue and users in 1st world countries would be generally the ones with spending cash for messaging apps).

> That + the fact that it was tied to your phone number was in my opinion genius.

This is an important aspect. Having accounts and contacts based on phone numbers allowed my mother and her friends to use the service in no time - those are the kind of people that don't know their own email address (if they have one at all) and would never register for an account on their own. Phone numbers, however, is the system they already knew since using SMS.

Did not early WhatsApp use a covert channel in sms signalling, just like you can get 2.4kb/s across the x.25 "D" channel of ISDN?

I've no idea if true or not, my memory unreliably tells me I found some kind of confirmation, but common sense tells me not to rely on such recollections.. but I often pondered if such channels exist in the GSM spec, back in the day, when I was shocked to receive a sms, the service having been given free to early subscribers in the UK, I literally had the first (edit)model Nokia GSM handset, and was most sceptical :D

I think you are mixing that up: SMS uses a signaling channel of GSM. It was originally not intended to become that big and just used otherwise unused resources. Therefore it could have been given out for free or very cheap. Later on telecom providers saw that people like text messages and that it has an enormous business potential, so they started to make huge charges for it.

The "otherwise unused" isn't true. Any time your phone is transmitting, it is using some of available bandwidth in the air. It does go other the control channel is GSM rather than setting up a data channel, and is was originally just for testing, carrier announcements etc. The per-SMS charge is far higher than actual costs, but so is everything. Mobile networks are almost entirely fixed costs in building the network.

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