Comment by aristofun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aristofun | Hacker News Reader

Whatsapp.

Overpromise, underdelivery.

Virtually every major function was broken at least once for me. Poor featerset, annoying and dumb ui. One of those app like skype before - you keep it only because of your grandma and few other important contacts who don’t know any better.

It is much worse than for instance pigeon mail. Because your expectations from pigeon mail more or less align with reality. And you expect from a 21st century software some basic things like cross device synchronization or at least reliable messsge and status drlivery, but it fails you, sonetimes in most important moments of your life.

The only feature they implemented well is video calls. It feels like it was implemented by some other (10x better) team than the rest of the app.

I think this perhaps sums up my feeling about this whole topic; which is that YMMV.

My world is divided into 2 spheres, personal and work. My personal world runs on WhatsApp. But then in my country everyone has WhatsApp. Nobody uses SMS (other than for spam and OTP), nobody cares about this week's offering from Google or Apple.

Voice calls, group chats, polls (invaluable for group decisions) DMs, etc.

I don't negate uour experience of it. Clearly it failed for you. But the nature of a thread like this is that it's all just personal experience, which is, not surprisingly all over the map.

i noticed about people who like WhatsApp are mostly one of these groups (or combination):

1. They don’t know any better

2. Their expectations low (anything better than sms is already good enough)

3. They see “everyone is using it in my country” as the main feature

4. They are very light users (they don’t need cross device synchronization, they don’t do business or live inside a messenger for work, they don’t care about extra latency, clumsy ui, resiliency, backups etc).

If entire countries runs on Whataspp (including business) (e.g: Brazil) it surely adds a lot of value ?

Of course, and that's a meaningful advantage. My point is that product itself can be terrible while its marketing and distribution is near perfect. Some sort of monopoly dynamics I suppose.

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