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Comment by zamalek | Hacker News Reader

The phone number requirement is why WhatsApp won the space over in the first place. There were loads of username+password-based services before it, but none reached the market it did. Why? An incredibly wide user funnel, singing up is frictionless.

You might understand that it's a bad idea, but that makes you an outlier.

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No, WhatsApp won because it successfully replicated and replaced the SMS experience in the developing world, where the cost of data was dirt cheap in comparison to the cost of a single SMS message.

This is why it still has a stronghold as well…

Experience on WhatsApp, Telegram or any other IM is vastly better than SMS. Unless by SMS you mean iMessage - then it's even simpler - most of the world doesn't use iPhones.

I think that's the gp's point.

Given the choice between SMS and a service that provides the same functionality is free, superior in most ways, borderless, etc. the choice to use whatsapp is obvious.

Mxit existed long before WhatsApp. Possibly a decade. I used it in the developing world and it wasn't anywhere nearly as successful as WhatsApp. For example, nobody in my family used it.

Why not support both?

Let one communicate from a computer (or phone) with a username+password account, with people who use the service with phone number account.

This without the mechanism Whatsapp uses, where you can use it in a web browser, but it's still linked to your phone.

Signal has an app to use it with your computer. It's a one time linkage through a QR code. As long as you connect with the app at least once every 30 days, you never have to worry about it and, unlike WhatsApp, your phone doesn't have to be online for it to work.

I don't really buy this argument. Is signing up with a phone number really that much easier for the average user than using a username/email account? Billions of people seemed to have no problems making a Facebook or Google account.

With WhatsApp, your phone number allowed you to see everyone in your contacts that you could message on there, so you could see everyone straight away. Without that, you'd have to bring your friends along and have them sign up as well, then give you their username so you can connect.

Even Instagram allows you to search your contacts. If they have their number set in their profiles, it'll find a match

It’s the building a social network part that’s frictionless not creating user name process that’s frictionless.

The lack of a social network is why I settled on Signal. Before using Signal I tried Telegram, which requires a phone number and if they recognize your number in any of their user's contact list (which many people seem happy to allow access to), they'll send them a notification telling them their contact has joined. I got a nasty message within 10 minutes of making an account from a woman accusing me of pretending to be her deceased father. I had inherited his phone number a decade prior, and it told her I had made an account. I was so shocked they not only allowed, but encouraged such behavior that I deleted it promptly and swore I'd never use it again.

Signal does the same thing. Or maybe it used to but they changed it. I have a bunch of notifications of "so and so is on Signal" from when I joined years ago.

Can't say I've ever gotten any psycho responses from it though.

Requiring a phone number also seems like a decent way increase friction for automated account creation - obviously it can be overcome, but it probably reduces automated account creation by a few orders of magnitudes, which I would imagine reduces the amount of botting/phishing/ban evasion, which could all add up to be pretty expensive to an org.

Using phone numbers as identifiers (and by extension users' phone books as a contact discovery mechanism) is probably at least equally significant as a factor for WhatsApp's success.

What did WhatsApp win? I've never used it, so I'm not sure what anyone uses it for.

In South America it's the standard messaging everyone uses, even businesses. No one uses SMS

I'd say it's basically standard everywhere outside the US. I lived in Canada and Europe, and eneryone is on it. All my fellow immigrants in the US are all on WhatsApp groups.

You could do both, no?

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