How WhatsApp became an unstoppable global cultural force
restofworld.org
restofworld.org
The description of WhatsApp here is exactly what Elon wanted X to become (which clearly didn't and almost certainly now won't happen). But I'm curious as to why such as "super-app" hasn't taken root in the US like it has elsewhere.
Considering FaceTime postdates the GIF experience, I'm sure plenty of corporate lawyers understood the problem much better.
This was around the same time that Apple was charging for OS upgrades, at least on Mac, and I think they wouldn't have wanted to pay for something they were providing for free.
Not sure it would help them build their network, but I guess it's an option.
I was tremendously pissed off when I moved from a BlackBerry (with blackberry messenger and “free over data” messaging) to an iPhone in 2008 and had to go back to paying per sms sent. The moment WhatsApp became available I got it (and paid for it!) and have been using it ever since.
I wonder what other iPhone users did for data messaging before iMessage became available.
There was a period of time where someone was selling low end phones with an unauthorized and incomplete client built in... In addition to not supporting group messages, it apparently had a backdoor to remote send spam.
Microsoft really missed an opportunity, I remember using a third party app for Messenger and the mobile experience wasn't great. Skype was too focused on voice and video calls, not seen as an instant messaging app, even though it could very well have been.
The biggest fumble really comes from Google though. I was using Google Talk as my main messaging app on PC, and Android had pretty much everything ready before iOS, including video chat over 3G.
However Google went through a pointless revamp with Hangouts and never managed a convincing SMS integration.
Where Google went wrong was bowing to pressure from carriers to stop doing that. Carriers had been much more powerful in the past, and I think Google failed to recognize just how fast their influence was waning.
Google killed the integration in 2017 when they started betting on RCS and Google Messages more seriously.
So it was trying to juggle carrier + OEMs + Android and keep everyone happy.
Anything that upset one party wasn't going to happen. Only in more recent, Samsung/Pixel-centric times has Google had iPhone-like negotiating weight (and will).
I don't have an authoritative citation, but complaints from carriers is often reported as the reason Google backed away from the default SMS client decision. Here's one example, but I've seen it from other publications: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/rip-google-hangouts-...
I had a Nexus 4 and then 5 in 2013 and even though I was a big Hangouts user, I quickly disabled the SMS integration as it served no purpose in my case.
It would be extremely weird for carriers to pressure Google on such a niche feature among Android users when Apple actually pulled it off successfully for the other half of their subscribers.
> Google caved and introduced the standalone Google Messages in the next Android release.
This was more likely motivated by Jibe's acquisition and Google pushing a big revamp of RCS (Universal Profile) at the GSMA.
Ars also forgets to mention Allo. Google's strategy was a complete mess on its own, no need to blame carriers.
I can't help but think carriers were the reason Samsung didn't make Hangouts the default SMS client, which contributed to Hangouts not gaining momentum fast enough, which led to Google acquiring Jibe and launching other chat products.
> and once shared-data plans reach critical mass, Verizon and other companies will have an active incentive to encourage the use of messaging services like Skype. More Web-sent data requires a beefier data allotment, after all.
Wasn't that already the case?! I didn't really follow plans available in the US around 2012-2013, but in East Asia and Europe, making subscribers pay more for bigger and faster data packages on LTE is exactly what every carrier was doing.
Regarding Samsung phones, of course Samsung had a good relationship with carriers and would typically be more willing to bend to their will, for instance by delaying and doing staged rollouts of firmware upgrades. However this isn't the main reason here. Samsung was absolutely dominating the Android market, being pretty much the only player making comfortable profit margins on the hardware. On the other hand, Samsung's leadership understood that there was nothing easier than moving from an Android phone to another, and that eventually a big part of the cake would be eaten by Chinese OEMs. Samsung worked hard on building its own brand of phones with One UI and its predecessors. The leadership absolutely hated the fact Google forced so many apps being preinstalled on certified Android phones. Hence people complaining about the number of duplicate apps seen as bloatware, sometimes rightfully so.
I don't think Samsung was afraid carriers would take offense at something as ubiquitous as OTT messaging. Case in point, I had coworkers working on ChatON, our own version of iMessage/FaceTime. This was a flop obviously, which is a bit sad since I believe Samsung had a real chance to acquire KakaoTalk around that time.
iMessage was exactly that sort of threat, and articles from the time mention carriers disliking it. Not selling iPhones would have hurt a carrier more than it would have hurt Apple, so their negotiating position was weak.
Google didn't have as tight control over Android as it does now, so carriers could pressure OEMs to not include Hangouts, or at least not make it the default SMS client.
Not just paid, they gouge their enterprise customers for it. Signal did a cost breakdown[0] and of their $13.7 million infra costs, a whopping $6 million is "registration fees".
But even on (near) stock Android, you could easily install the AOSP client, or some third party (Textra was popular somehow).
I'm surprised Sony wouldn't bundle a proper SMS client by default. I thought only Nexus phones and Motorolas would default to Hangouts for a relatively short period, until Google started pushing Messages instead.
I remember using Hangouts (and Google Talk before it) with almost everybody in my social circle. It had XMPP interoperability for a while (which let me use it at a computer, even with my phone battery dead, at a time when WhatsApp was available on the phone only) and it otherwise just worked.
I never understood why Google went out of their way as much as they did to kill a perfectly fine product in favor of various alternatives that just looked like yet another WhatsApp clone, including all the deficiencies of that (i.e. being single-device only, not using the existing Google account social network etc.)
Enter Whatsapp, which has been pretty consistent through the years, and of course guess which one people use.
[1]: Of course, it's crazy from a product management perspective - but from a "launch a new product to get the next promotion" perspective...
It was dead simple to use. You had a phone, installed Whatsapp, it sent you a verification text that it automatically read and verified to ensure you owned that phone number, and that was your “account”.
No user names to remember, no passwords, a completely computer illiterate person could use it, especially if their first device ever was a smartphone.
And it worked amazingly well. And there was no spam. I specifically remember sharing contacts being a pain in the ass until WhatsApp came along.
I kinda wish that had paned out.
It'd still be hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly revenue. Plus businesses.
I still remember the "Ping!" app (not Blackberry Ping). Because early iOS was very lackluster with no notification support, every message was a pop-up. And "Ping!" itself had no message history. WhatsApp followed pretty closely after.
Even earlier, people used MSN via eBuddy. Not everyone had a smartphone yet, but at least the whole world was on MSN, so as long as the person without a smartphone was at a PC, you could converse. Someone had to text you "hey, get on eBuddy/MSN" though. Apps could either be foregrounded or dead in the background. There was no background processing aside from privileged apps like Mail or Music. And there was no notification service that could act like an IRC bouncer and wake up your backgrounded application. Medieval times.
Also, back then almost no one was using data, it was texting / calling that was still the major cash cow of providers, so you often got unlimited data for very cheap.
Funnily enough that "unlimited data for cheap" later led to a pretty big scuffle between providers and clever people who rolled over their contract indefinitely. Legally providers had to keep providing them with unlimited internet. The trick they did to push customers to renew their subscription was only providing them with 2G or 3G data (depending on their contract) and also limiting their speeds to the lowest tier. One provider even went as far as squeezing them on band access.
Before WhatsApp there was blackberry messenger (BBM). When I was growing up kids were running around with blackberry phones, marketed at businessmen, purely for BBM. WhatsApp was just this, except on a platform that didn’t suck.
WhatsApp also predates iMessage and FaceTime.
I was surprised to find this accurate. Though the lineage for a Mac user would likely include Messages and iChat, which go back further.
iChat: 2002 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IChat Messages: 2007 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messages_(Apple) iMessage: 2011 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMessage WhatsApp: 2009 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp
The reason it got so popular in other counties is the extortionate pricing of SMSes. WhatsApp used (and still uses) very little data and with the lowest level data tariff you would still get more messaging quota. Moreover it costed nothing when WiFi on phones became a thing. Then sending pictures for free became a thing too.
They were also a smaller company and it didn't bother people to pay a small amount for all of the benefits they got.
Flat rate plans in Europe started appearing a bit later and usually never included MMS, so it was calls and texts only, but no photos. WhatsApp changed that.
Apple is popular also in Europe, and Android has a 43% market share in the US. But in Europe nobody would use a messaging system that is broken for 40% of their contacts. So either in the US there is no intersection between the social circles of people that use Android vs Apple (highly improbable) or something in the US culture makes people willing to cripple their own experience in order to impose a tax on those in the outgroup.
If I were to come up with a social/economic theory to further back that, my guess would probably be that phone users in the US have a "full service mentality" much more than in the rest of the world:
Buying a phone on a (very expensive) monthly plan that subsidizes the device is much more common than elsewhere, and historically, SIM cards weren't even a thing, so devices were tied to a given network and (to some extent) even a subscriber much more than in the rest of the world.
That would logically extend to people not expecting to have to install a third-party app for what they consider to be "basic phone functionality".
People use it for chatting with people, groups of people, or businesses. Virtually no one uses the Status or Communities feature.
I have 289 people in my phone book right now, 1 of them occasionally posts on Status when on vacation. Of 25 people I quickly checked with, not one of them uses Communities.
I could imagine the same for channels, as WhatsApp is zero-rated on many data plans in the developing world (as well as for in-flight Wi-Fi plans in more and more airlines!), which would make that an economical way of staying up to date on news.
One can speculate why they don't.
This is basically illegal in the USA. US Banks are extremely stringently regulated to the point where many international banks do not even want to take US customers because that would subject them to US laws about banks. That is how insanely challenging it is for literal banks with decades of past and current experience to manage the regulations. "Move fast and break things" would get "Go directly to jail, do not pass go". Even money transmitter licenses like Paypal and Venmo are extremely challenging. And even those companies try really hard to make sure they do not get classified as a bank.
Trying to graft on a social platform onto a bank or a money transmitter would make the entire social platform subject to bank/money transmitter business restrictions which is almost certainly doomed legally. It is not like these companies do not know to add payments, it is just so insanely hard that even the 900 pound gorillas do not want to mess with Godzilla.
It succeeded because it was around at the time where SMS messages where expensive, but smart phones where exploding in popularity.
It’s the “everything app” for messaging, friends and groups.
- Booking trains on the national railway
- Booking flights
- Booking hotels
- Paying all your bills
- Buying stuff
- Ordering food
- Renting a bike
- Getting a rideshare
- Seeing a doctor
- Donating to charities
- Investing
- Reading e-books
- Pretty much everything else
A lot of it is done through their HTML5 "mini-app" ecosystem but it's all under one everything app.
China is a pretty specific and unique market. Perhaps the existence of such an “everything app” is related to that, explaining why it doesn’t exist elsewhere?
I observe that these applications which are everything apps almost always have integrated payments platforms. This is not always the case, but seems to be the stickiest part of the offering. My thesis is that a competitive application with a integrated payments platform will eventually outcompete the ones without. Payments are possible in China with WeChat which is dominant. Payments are possible in India and Brazil with WhatsApp which are their dominant markets.
Counter-examples would take the form of markets/countries where there are multiple-domain applications with payments platforms that rapidly lose or lost marketshare to multiple-domain applications without payments. Markets where no popular application has payments provide no information as to the relative value of a integrated payments platform.
But this is essentially a sample size of 1?
There’s definitely an advantage to having integrated payments if you want to do “everything” (most of which requires or is related to payment of some kind).
But IMO you’re missing the forest for the trees: adding a payment button to an app is essentially integrated from the PoV of the user - you can do it with Apple Pay or google wallet seamlessly. So why isn’t this good enough?
That lacks payments between friends, so that’s the most important factor? But then in most first-world countries you’re now competing against banks (old and new), who solve this really well, and a myriad of country-specific shit. That’s why they don’t exist.
So really, it’s not just “payments” - it’s becoming the common digital medium of exchange, and that can only happen now for very large, single currency markets that are starting to transition from an unbanked cash based society to a banked one.
You can’t just shove payments onto WhatsApp and expect people to use it to pay their utility bills in a market that has established and seamless ways to do this already. Why would companies make changes to support this?
You are arguing in the wrong direction. You think I am arguing that supporting payments is a compelling feature for get customers. So, logically, you just need to add the ability to do payments in some way. My argument is actually that a robust payments platform is the moat needed to prevent your "everything" app from fragmenting by preventing your users from going around or under you. A lower level platform that provides a low friction means of payments for delivered services undercuts the coherency of the higher level platform since applications can be delivered around you.
So your examples actually support my argument. Payment platforms like Apple Pay and Google Wallet attached to their service delivery platforms, the app stores + OS, make it hard to lock people into "everything" apps because the OS is the "everything" app. Efficient inter-account transfers prevent "everything" apps from locking users into their payment ecosystem. If you do not have the payment moat, you are left with actually competing on features and delivery of services which is really hard to do across "everything", so you are better off focusing instead of trying to make a "everything" app.
> It’s the “everything app” for messaging, friends and groups.
I'd call that a "some things app" :)
Source: I used it for years in China at the time it evolved into the "everything" app
Not sure that’s true everywhere. In Slovenia we had unlimited texting way before we had smartphones.
By around 2005 all carriers offered a “teenager” plan with unlimited texting and near zero phone minutes. Data was not yet a selling point.
Now that I think about it WhatsApp really took the country by storm- the only thing that I can compare it with was Napster and Kazaa. And just like those it was all done by word of mouth! No commercials or ads. It was all organic.
[1] https://faq.whatsapp.com/1293279751500598
[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/whatsapp-...
because there's a lot more traditional banking and business infrastructure in the US or Europe than there is in China or India, so the latter just leapfrogged over it and the experience of using Alipay or running your business of Whatsapp is just much better than any legacy institution in those countries. People in countries with more established ways of doing things are both too used to and don't have that much of an incentive to switch because most stuff works sort of okay.
Same reason why WhatsApp adoption itself is lower in the US and sms based messaging held out so long. The US had cheap sms plans earlier so people were less eager to switch while everyone else just jumped to internet based messaging.
If roughly 15% of the US population is immigrants [1], and not all of them communicate across borders, and very few non-immigtants communicate cross borders there's not a whole lot of demand for a product that reduces costs of cross border messaging in the US.
As an early employee if anyone knew about WhatsApp, they almost certainly were a younger immigrant. Everyone else was like 'why would I use that?, I have unlimited texts' or they were using BBM.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/27/u-s-immig...
thankfully, roaming got abolished in the first half of the 2010's thank to an EU directive, but at that time whatsapp was already very large across the EU.
This means we now have this funny situation where if you’re abroad, sending international texts or calls is included in your plan. But if you’re in your own country, calling or texting someone in a different country is not.
Other countries charged per SMS so everyone had good reason to use an app instead.
The US didn't charge, so why would anyone download an app?
Consequently, I don't remember much of a timespan when US customers had both (a) SMS caps/charges and (b) smartphones with open-enough app stores to distribute something like WhatsApp.
For much of the rest of the world, including international communication, that was a more extended period.
More like charged so exorbitantly up front so there’s no reason to additionally charge per use. My AT&T phone bill in the early 2010s was ~$80 as a single line or ~$50 per line as part of a family, which was several times over what I paid elsewhere with per-minute/text pricing. I later switched to a cheap MVNO (PureTalk) which did charge per text.
To be an everything app, it needs to have, at the very least, a built-in payment system, fully featured social media content (ie. proper feeds and comments, at least on the level of Twitter), and non-trivial integration with other apps, businesses, and/or government entities. (This isn't even getting into eg. paying rent, ordering takeout, playing games, etc.)
Calling WhatsApp is just kind of missing the point of the definition.
It is simply better than SMS and is dead simple. You can have a business app that makes this be a separate thing from your personal life while using the same phone.
I have seen it used as a way to contact restaurants or local stores, order stuff, but that was the extent of it. Just communication, nothing else.
For me, at least, it has only been the messaging app I'm willing to use to be in touch with non-techie friends.
In China, same thing, on WeChat.
In the US, they want you to register some stupid MyHealth thing, sign some paper documents, and mail follow up shit to your residential address. They won't give you medical records on anything other than a fucking CD-ROM, even in 2024. Somehow in the US, a messaging app isn't "official" enough, and there's going to be the one first amendment brat* that doesn't want to install WhatsApp for privacy reasons.
* I say this jokingly, and do think we need to be harsher on corporations. However, my point is that in collectivist countries like Indonesia/China, if you don't install WhatsApp/WeChat or whatever is the chosen national app, you'll be the outcast and nobody will help you. The collectivist societies tend to embrace these apps for their convenience, rather than question their terms and conditions.
That is because you don't have any good online ID authenticator. Something like BankId in Sweden is so incredibly practical in a lot of ways.
What do non-citizens use in Sweden to get around?
The "everything apps" of places that have them aren't usually restricted to only citizens (though some admittedly have shitty UIs for non-citizens)
There's a lower-level, different number, which is less powerful, but easier to get.
Same in Denmark too. You get a "CPR" number, and can login to most government services (as well as some commercial ones) with "MitID" (my ID). It's quite convenient. I can even use my MitID to buy alcohol without having to interact with another human being in Rema 1000 using their self-checkout app.
Ireland—where I moved from—has a similar "PPS" number that all residents can get, although the online aspect is not nearly as well integrated as it is here in Denmark; it's slowly improving.
But banking, social media, ID/login, maps, albums, browsing etc I all do outside of whatsapp.
A particular banking service option I use is only available on WhatsApp
I lived in China for years, right during the time that WeChat (WeiXin) came out and evolved to become the "everything" app (vanquishing Weibo and others).
But I've only used WhatsApp for text messages and didn't even know that it had all these other features until I read this article.
So maybe it isn't really comparable to WeChat in that sense -- or maybe it is, I don't really know actually.
A friend asked me to use it first. She's not a techie, but she wasn't earning much and my first instinct was a mild annoyance that she was being cheap and trying to get me to use this other weird thing. What I had "worked" and had everyone on it. But ok, I'll try it. Became an early-ish adopter, spoke with her and a few people, over time it grew and utterly replaced texts. For friends, work, groups. If you try texting there, you're a dinosaur. We had no sense of social stigma of blue/green ticks. Everyone had the same ticks.
Moved to Australia and now I have to check. It's mostly WhatsApp but still some texts, and I have to check if someone is on WhatsApp rather than assume. Once or twice I've had to send on both channels. But there are WhatsApp groups everywhere, so no idea why this texting thing is still alive.
Notice and compare your own instincts when you read this. You might have the opposite reaction depending on where you are.
And for startups, it's whether you can land and enable a benefit before the existing company builds it. Speed vs distribution. Texting was so big a source of revenue that the local network providers kept the price high and basically lost it all. They could have dropped the price to where network effects prevented movement. The comfort of having the buttons and features and network where you expect them is massive.
Once I was brainstorming with a German colleague about a new business chat feature, and he said we should target WhatsApp as a channel. My American colleagues were like, "No one uses that these days."
But Americans have little idea how popular WhatsApp really is in Europe, and Brazil (where it's colloquially called Zappy Zappy), and vast swaths of the world. The American experience isn't as normative as we assume. I only know this because I'm part of a diaspora network and I have contacts from all over the world -- FB Messenger and iMessage are not as popular as we think outside of certain high GDP countries.
Conversely, some suggested targeting iOS in Germany, but my German colleague immediately said that iOS marketshare in Germany is actually fairly low. That surprised me but he was right.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/461900/android-vs-ios-ma...
Even France, with its reputation for liking premium products, does not have a high iOS market share.
Japan does have a very high iOS market share however because they appreciate craftsmanship, and due to Softbank's efforts in the country.
I remember the early days of WhatsApp -- it was the non-SMS messaging platform of choice in an era when phone plans changed for texting.
That and, well... Google has been more supportive of EU countries than Apple. Apple maps was useless in the EU for a long time. Plus horrendous support across the EU. If you are in a big city, yeah you will find an Apple Store, otherwise tough luck.
It has nothing to do with craftmanship.
However, Google Maps runs fine on iOS and you can purchase Apple products from other retailers and they will also handle warranty claims. None of my Apple products were bought from an Apple Store.
Always funny when someone puts an AirTag in their luggage and wonders why they get few updates in a developing country.
Uhhhh, yeah, their average baggage handler and airport employee doesn’t have an iPhone, that’s why.
Citation needed
Yeah that's probably not the case.
Sent from my Sony Xperia 1 VI
I don't know what an "everything app" is, but that's not my experience with WhatsApp in Europe. It's just how you text or call everyone or businesses, but there's no payments or anything else going on beyond perhaps the occasional business chatbot. But even then, most 'businesses' I interact with over WhatsApp is just some person with a phone.
Free or cheap texting hamstrung WhatsApp’s growth in some countries like the US. It was better in countries where cell plans were expensive because data didn’t meter per communication like SMS and WhatsApp was efficient.
WhatsApp isn’t an everything app like WeChat.
But, somehow I don't view it as a "cultural force" the way other social media sites are.
I guess because it's just people talking/chatting/sending-pics with their contacts, so there's no algorithm driving/changing peoples' behavior. It's like the cultural force of everyone having cell phones with free (and improved) SMS (which of course is a big change in society).
I've also never used WA to meet people, engage with strangers, or try to impress strangers. It's just people I've met in real life.
Although, a lot of this article is about the broadcast and "channels" features that I don't really use.
I agree, there is nothing cultural about it. I think its because there are no "discovery" features. You cant search for groups or people or whatever. You need to know someone well enough that they have your mobile number, in order to invite you to social groups etc.
All of my friends in brazil, for instance, are entirely attached to whatsapp.
I agree with the other reply. Where do you live? I'm surprised that you haven't encountered any. Every city in the US that I visited and every city that I visited internationally has people that attach themselves to one of either whatsapp, telegram, imessage, etc.
(I'm kind of excluding wechat here because wechat seems to be forced, but there are plenty of people who have this attachment to wechat as well because of its status as an omni app)
The above are just two examples but people really do almost everything within Whatsapp without using any special features.
What’s their profit model here anyway?
SMS providers are unreliable and expensive, it's eating their business.
Is it actually though? At least in the UK I still get every business message (delivery notifications, booking confirmations etc.) via SMS. I haven't received a single one via WhatsApp. And WhatsApp has 100% penetration here so that isn't a barrier.
That's why it insists so badly on having full access to your contacts.
> We need your contacts to provide the service, but don’t share your contacts with Meta.
It is absolutely true that WhatsApp collects your contacts' phone numbers and your social graph. Unless WhatsApp has stopped doing that, in which case it should make a big announcement.
I don't know if the social graph is used outside WhatsApp, so that part may not be true, but it is within the privacy policy to do so (at least the one I see, EU may have a different one), the privacy policy says WhatsApp may share information with Meta to among other things:
> improving their services and your experiences using them, such as making suggestions for you (for example, of friends or group connections, or of interesting content), personalizing features and content, helping you complete purchases and transactions, and showing relevant offers and ads across the Meta Company Products;
And there have been waves of policy updates, notifications etc specifically to get these terms. That doesn't mean Find my Friends gets this information, but I thought there was at least discussion of it.
> We need your contacts to provide the service, but don’t share your contacts with Meta.
I'm frustrated that people even at HN allow themselves to indulge in conspiracy theories that would be immediately whistle-blowed or reported on. There are thousands of people that work on or with WhatsApp and related products within Meta who would notice, not to mention all the data separation audits that happen.
There are plenty of ways to make this statement 100% factual and still effectively leak the user's address book, at least in a form useful to Meta. It is true that Meta doesn't need your raw contacts, it just needs certain inferences made from them. WhatsApp can perfectly well make those inferences and only share those, with some trivially-reversed "anonymization" on top as an extra layer of obfuscation.
> improving their services and your experiences using them, such as making suggestions for you (for example, of friends or group connections, or of interesting content), personalizing features and content, helping you complete purchases and transactions, and showing relevant offers and ads across the Meta Company Products;
What you're saying is either an outright lie you are telling us, or a lie you have been told and are yourself choosing to believe to feel better about working for them, or to not put yourself at risk by digging deeper and finding adverse information (which once you know it you may be required to blow the whistle or find yourself legally complicit in the matter).
Basic economics suggests there is no reason Meta (then-Facebook) would pay what it had paid for WhatsApp for "just" a messaging app, especially before it was as entrenched as it is now (and so could trivially be dethroned by Facebook's own offering). They did so because unlike Facebook, people trusted WhatsApp with access to their contacts and that information is extremely important for Meta.
Source: also worked at meta and had full access to WhatsApps codebase, like most engineers at meta
A lot of this became public from FTC vs Meta: https://www.businessinsider.com/ftc-facebook-lawsuit-makes-z...
users data, perhaps? your data feed into FB's machine. I'm sure they will figured out how to make money.
Driving force with 20-30 somethings in early Whatsapp days in Europe was simply the first viable group messaging and sharing photos.
And the simplicity of onboarding! It immediately checked all your contacts to see who uses whatsapp. All other apps used usernames and invites. This worked immediately.
It worked on both phones, so everyone could join the group.
Free SMS was ok, but operators offered typical packages 500,1000 or 3000 free /month so it wasn’t an issue for anyone with a job. But for some it was great.
Combine these three factors and it spread like wildfire in few years.
Before that, we were using Skype, but I remember WhatsApp being so much more convenient/better, especially on mobile.
If it would have been very costly to send an SMS/call a different US state, I bet WhatsApp would have taken in the US.
Very unfortunate given its now part of an adtech conglomerate. The defacto messaging app for such uses should be Signal.
This got me wondering if people in US do not typically have such group chats or whats the alternative?
I suspect it’s both regionally and class dependent however.
WhatsApp and similar offer exactly the same kind of media transfers that iMessage offers.
I suspect the prevalence of iMessage and its weird mix with SMS/MMS results in people not realizing that it is a third-party service.
How WhatsApp for business changed the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42366753 - Dec 2024 (163 comments)
Example, adding an option to have to seek your permission to join a particular group is a godsend, since family members are all too happy to add you to their group where every post is a nonsensical forward, or random people add you to their "investments" group (pump and dump schemes). Also, considering the scale of WhatsApp, I get far fewer spam than I get in direct phone/SMS communication. Also I can block businesses permanently if they start abusing their messaging privileges.
I just wish they had kept it a more chat-focused platform rather than adding other stuff (channels, status, AI agents, etc). It's a pain that I can't disable features I don't need (eg. I don't want to use Meta AI, but I still have to see that annoying icon). But it's Meta, and they don't necessarily respect people not wanting something, so don't think you can do much about it.
You wouldn't have said old flip phone was a social media, even if effectively whatsapp does the same stuff.
There is a big difference between an app pushing you toward "brand yourself" and with algorithm-controlled content and a contacting-app with none of the previous stuff. Yes, they are both "social" in the sense that they allow us to reach other humans, but that's where it ends.
I'm sure there are features I don't know about whatsapp though.
I use WhatsApp because all my family and friends are on it. We’re all on it because it’s the dominant chat network in the UK.
It might seem like SMS must be an option because everyone has it, because if you have WA then you’ve got a number and can receive SMS, but that’s not how people view it. SMS is an app like every other (to most people), but it’s an app that doesn’t have their other chats in (only 2FA codes and spam), and one that mostly doesn’t sync to their other devices as well.
- No logins. No sign-ups. Mobile phone number was the username; SIM card, the password.
- No central database of messages. No backup & restore. No stickers. No web-based access. Only fast text-based relays. For phones.
- Aggressive cross platform focus. Including clients for Blackberry & Symbian, not just mainstream OSes.
- Little to no perceptible downtime. Worked just fine in all sorts of flaky networks. Consistently and reliably.
- No ads, no spam.
- As cheap or cheaper than SMS (£1/yr), but works & roams globally.
- Voice notes and media to expand beyond the Anglosphere.
Another tidbit I find interesting: Jan used the fact that every time an app's title / description was changed, it would show up at the top in the "new" category of the iOS App Store, to help reach a wider install base.
In short, being laid off from Yahoo! to being rejected by Facebook, brought the best out of Jan & Brian. They ran a very unconventional SV startup and got a lot of the details exactly and deliberately right. Not many stood a chance, as evidenced by their eventual £22bn exit.
Even if it were an open source app with open governance, the shaping of culture happens at a different layer. And that shaping sometimes is guided and not in the best interest of the users.