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Comment by BillyTheKing | Hacker News Reader

In fairness, I think WhatsApp's value proposition is and was as little more than 'just' oh wait, sms etc. is completely insecure. I don't think the majority really cared about that (especially since end-to-end encryption was a later addition). I think most people primarily started using WhatsApp because a) it was (is) free b) cross-platform c) worked very reliably

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Most people profoundly do not understand or care about the vagaries of how their messaging is encrypted.

They do care about SMS fees, especially across international borders.

They do care about sending group texts between Android and iOS and not having things go slowly haywire as messages don’t come across.

They do care about sending messages over wifi if they’re somewhere without a cell signal. (OK, bit of a Canadian thing, but the cottage has wifi and no cell signal.)

> They do care about sending messages over wifi if they’re somewhere without a cell signal. (OK, bit of a Canadian thing, but the cottage has wifi and no cell signal.)

That you have to explain why you might be without cell signal shows that you are blessed up there. Today I talked with someone a few miles outside of Frankfurt (Germany) - huge financial hub - and the line broke down almost 3 times due to bad signal...

Simple Groups and painless multimedia was what gave WhatsApp the edge in the early days

Liked "Simple Groups and painless multimedia was what gave WhatsApp the edge in the early days"

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^ That's and ultra low res photo sharing what you get when you group SMS/MMS with folks in the Apple ecosystem. You don't get it in WhatsApp, etc.

I'm not sure what this comment is saying.

It's mocking iMessage trying to convey some extra features (like liking) over SMS which doesn't work very well.

And general costs. Whilst SMS might be free (or effectively free, plans including thousands of messages per month are not unknown) for vast swathes of people, but MMS is most definitely not.

I really doubt it was about security. My bet is on convenience and the fact that it's free for Non-North Americans while SMS is not.

E2E encryption is certainty a reason that non-techies use WhatsApp, particularly in preference to Facebook Messenger since 'Facebook reads all those messages' as a friend said. Which I don't think is technically possible any more, but remains a common suspicion.

A lot of people I knew that used WhatsApp used it because international text used to be prohibitively expensive and it was notoriously unreliable. So most of my friends used it in Europe. Also you can still use it if you aren't on cellular while traveling. Although I'm sure the cross-platform, freeness, and reliability were all pluses.

Also for all of the messaging apps out there it's surprising how much feature differentiation they still have. Once you get used to a certain feature set it's hard to move to something with a different set even if it's overall probably better.

It wasn’t free in the beginning but it was cheaper to send a picture message from it than from MMS

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