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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

This shows how important UX really is. UI can be all glam and shiny, but the software with the most accessible of UX wins, more often than not.

I always come back to the example of WhatsApp and how it took on SMS, IM, and emails and won. People claiming WhatsApp went in mobile first are getting it only partially right. WhatsApp defined itself as a replacement for SMS: No login passwords, no chat history, cross platform and that led to them being cheaper, better, faster, frictionless. Later added MMS-esque capabilities like media and then email-esque features like Groups with super nice execution on the UX front.

Similar thing for AMP pages: It just works and it is blazing fast.

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A really important element of WhatsApp's global success is that they had a Java ME app for featurephones.

US-centric competitors would only support iOS and Android, whereas WhatsApp was running on the hundreds of millions of 2003-2010 vintage Nokia/Samsung featurephones that were in daily use in India, Indonesia, Nigeria, etc.

That is also part of UX. When it comes to messaging apps, Snapchat is one extreme of the spectrum -- iPhone-focused, cryptic UI, teen-oriented, majority of users in USA -- and WhatsApp is the very opposite. Both are successful examples of UX focus.

> cryptic UI, teen-oriented

These things go hand-in-hand by the way. And that's not a complaint, it's just funny how "only teens bother to figure this out" can be an honest-to-goodness feature under specific circumstances. Especially if you (basically) need to be "introduced" to a program and all of its quirks through your friends.

I hated it at first, but I've come to really appreciate being able to swipe around through almost all the screens, vs. having to stretch across my phone to hit menus on the far corners in other apps

Agreed. They still need to put in more subtle cues to do things though. Most people don't know you can use multiple filters/stickers or touch a location to change it.

> Similar thing for AMP pages: It just works and it is blazing fast.

It is already blazing fast with only HTML and CSS, as the Web was designed to be.

EDIT: typo

Add some async JavaScript to onclick, onchange, etc. events.

WhatsApp also won because it did what most tech companies seem to consider antithetical to their purpose: put international customers on equal footing to US customers. So many companies either don't serve or completely gimp their product outside the US, often for no good reason.

Unfortunately AMP pages don't just work. I've had problems with them, especially with the top menu that is hard to bring back when scrolling up sometimes. Also sometimes the page doesn't load and I have to go back and reopen the page. No consistency on functionality... (Some sites are missing links to important things like comments)

> cross platform

Only mobile, the web version is shitty because it hosts a web server on your phone which is unreliable. And even with that you can only access the web version from one computer and it does not work well on tablets.

Not to mention you get banned from trying to use any unofficial client if your device/OS happen to not be supported.

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