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Comment by loloquwowndueo | Hacker News Reader

An interesting tidbit is that WhatsApp actually predates FaceTime and iMessage, and thus it was one of the earliest iPhone apps that allowed sending text messages over data as opposed to SMS. Interoperability with Android was a plus.

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.

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At least here in Brazil, WhatsApp consolidated its position by working well in feature phones that ran J2ME and dominated the low-end market before Android. It took testing and adaptation to each and every available phone (as far as I can remember, J2ME was kind of a loose standard so developing a J2ME on one device did not guarantee it ran well, or at all, in any other). This, coupled with the possibility of eliding the outrageous SMS rates and the availability of EDGE data plans.

WhatsApp ran on Nokia S40, which is J2ME, but it did not run on other J2ME phones (unless there was some way to put the s40 app bundle on them? I never heard about that).

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.

I found it surprising at the time that instant messaging apps that originated on PCs (ICQ, AIM, Skype, etc...) did not get widely adopted for this role despite most of the well-known ones releasing iOS and Android versions at the time.

ICQ and AIM were pretty much dead already.

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.

Hangouts was the default SMS client in Android for a while, and it worked well enough as an SMS client that I never heard anybody complain about it. Much like iMessage, it could upgrade to internet-based messaging if both people in a conversation used it.

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.

I don't buy it. Google just followed iMessage, only two years later, I don't see why carriers would suddenly have an issue with that. Plus Hangouts has never been a mainstream mobile messaging app, and I was a big user at the time. I worked at Samsung then and I'd bet most Android users never launched Hangouts nor even noticed it was preinstalled.

Google killed the integration in 2017 when they started betting on RCS and Google Messages more seriously.

At the time, Google was in a much weaker position to push against carrier demands, because it didn't have as firm control over Android OEMs.

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).

But realistically I don't know why any carrier would give a damn about this. In 2013, SMS was already irrelevant in most of the world. And in the US pretty much everyone had had unlimited texting for a while. Encouraging people towards OTT messaging was beneficial to carriers that were now ubiquitously making money on data packages, not texts/calls.

End users are not the only customers for SMS. A large number of automated notifications, confirmations, and 2FA codes are sent that way, and carriers get paid for it.

And how is this relevant to Hangouts acting as the default SMS client for a minority of subscribers?

If it was nearly every Android device, it wouldn't have been a minority in the mid 2010s.

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-...

It really was a tiny minority, almost nobody bought Google phones at the time. The vast majority of Android users never even knew of the Hangouts SMS integration.

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.

Here's a related story from the period about why Microsoft didn't try something similar with Skype: https://www.pcworld.com/article/447285/why-skype-still-cant-...

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.

In retrospect this seems like a silly concern given the Windows Phone market share and how obvious the solution was:

> 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.

The impression I have from period reporting is that American carriers still saw voice and SMS as core businesses and viewed anything that directly tried to transition users away from that as a threat. Including a messaging app on a phone wasn't dangerous if both parties had to have it, but a seamless upgrade from SMS as the default would lead to nobody using SMS.

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.

> End users are not the only customers for SMS. A large number of automated notifications, confirmations, and 2FA codes are sent that way, and carriers get paid for it.

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".

[0]https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/

Did Samsung use a different SMS client by default? I had Nexus and Xperia devices at the time, and they defaulted to Hangouts. If Samsung didn't use it, that approach might not have had much chance of reaching critical mass.

Right, Samsung had its own SMS client.

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.

Do you have any details on that being due to carrier pressure?

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.)

The amount of perfectly functional messaging apps Google has gone through is crazy[1]. Each Google messaging app (GTalk, Hangouts, Meet, etc) is perfectly functional, but with an endless series of migrations, why would you stay around and every several months/year explain to the non-technical family members how the new version of Google's messaging product works?

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...

Because WhatsApp was the first with password less-login using SMS login.

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 suppose none of the others, which could have leveraged their existing userbase chose to follow suit because the companies that owned them did not have a way to make money from them. WhatsApp didn't either, but startups weren't expected to.

The initial WhatsApp plan was to charge between $1 and 2€, initially a one time fee paid after a few weeks, then a yearly subscription after one free year.

I kinda wish that had paned out.

It'd still be hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly revenue. Plus businesses.

The funny thing is that on Android, I never had to pay the fee as the free trial kept getting extended. Only my friends with iPhones paid for WhatsApp, IIRC on iOS it was upfront too!

> An interesting tidbit is that WhatsApp actually predates FaceTime and iMessage, and thus it was one of the earliest iPhone apps that allowed sending text messages over data as opposed to SMS. Interoperability with Android was a plus.

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.

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