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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One can speculate why they don't.