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Comment by pearjuice | Hacker News Reader

Too little, too late. Whatsapp has taken the throne in multi-platform messaging quite some time ago. Just like Facebook and Google+, no matter how good and innovative the latter is, as long as all your friends are still on the former, the latter will not gain much traction.

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I don't use Whatsapp. It feels kind of anti-internet to me.

When your phone's battery dies, you can just keep checking your Whatsapp messages on your computer right? False.

Want to switch smartphone platforms, just log in to Whatsapp on your new phone and all your old messages (read: PHOTOS) are expectedly there, right? HAH.

Moved countries, and now I need to broadcast on my Facebook wall asking people to re-add me on Whatsapp? Because I got a new phone number? An app running on my supercomputer in my pocket with a retina display is still tied to a phone number? Are you fucking kidding me?

I use FB chat and Hangouts. I would use FB chat exclusively but it can't do video calls.

you can just keep checking your Whatsapp messages on your computer right? True I'm using bluestack software.I only checking whatsapp only office hour only.

There's a difference! Bluestack is a workaround.

Better situation would be at least a web app. An app that integrates Whatsapp with Windows and Macs (like iMessages work on Macs) will be a great idea.

Does it do syncing?

That is, while you're having a conversation on Bluestack on your computer and then you don't get a reply for a while, and when you get a reply on your phone, you completely forget what the conversation was about: will your phone show a history of the conversation from the computer?

I agree with you on this one.

I have no idea how every company running after messaging just forgets that we use computers! Almost every messenger app out there doesn't work on desktops. A simple web app will do, but no!

iMessages are quite close to what messaging should be. They work on your (Apple) desktop, phone and tablet and sync quite well. Too bad they're only for Apple Ecosystem!

Distributed systems with distributed, synchronized state is a hard problem. Whatsapp handles 27 billion messages per day. That's almost 50x Twitter's volume. The former behaves like a switch with pretty end-points (the smartphone app), whereas the latter is a massive distributed system storing enormous amounts of state.

If Whatsapp allowed you to log-in from multiple places but didn't synchronize your state for you (i.e., see conversation history that you had on your phone after you've moved to your computer) it would be a pretty unpleasant experience. To accomplish that, the switch-like back end wouldn't be sufficient.

I'm not sure what Google Talk's traffic is compared to Whatsapp, but gtalk allows simultaneous logins across many devices and does a decent job of synchronizing messages across them -- phone, tablet, computer (though there is a slight delay depending on the volume of messages it needs to sync).

I seriously doubt Google Talk (now called Hangouts) has anywhere close to Whatsapp's traffic. But even if they did, Google can support simultaneous login with synchronized state (and server-stored state) because it's solved a lot of these big problems in the past for other products with hundreds/thousands of engineers.

I can't say about WhatsApp in other countries but their usage is going to take a hit in India once they start charging(they plan to charge $0.99 per year, that is ~INR 60), people will flock.

Reasons: 1. People in India are too used to "free" software. Only legal software most purchase here is Windows that comes bundled with laptops/desktops. 2. Low credit card penetration. Most of the teens don't have credit cards. Thanks to government rules, we can't use debit cards to pay on App Stores as well.

So people either won't pay or can't pay. Many are already starting to use other apps and there is no shortage of free apps due to exploding messaging space.

The only reason it's free is so WhatsApp can make money at some point. If there are people who won't pay, ever, then there's less reason to keep them as users.

Not "no reason", however. I'm sure WhatsApp could find a way to monetise them, or just leverage them for network effect. WhatsApp is a lightweight replacement for text messages, not a full-blown social network. You pay a buck, you get free text messages, not unending trickery to overcome your privacy options. I have WhatsApp contacts worldwide, so even if some countries reduce their usage there's benefit in sticking with it. For $100 I'd stop using it. For $10, I'd think about it. $1 is a no-brainer, and I live in Africa.

Now I just wish they had a supported, paid-for API I could integrate with.

The missing element is trust, particularly in the professional / business market. I wouldn't dream of suggesting Whatsapp to my professional contacts. But BBM I just might, especially if they are (or were in the past) already blackberry users, so probably have an identity there.

No one in Australia uses Whatsapp, I have no idea how everyone else in the world communicates but everyone uses Skype or Facebook Chat to talk to each other here.

Also, everyone I know wouldn't pay for a communications protocol, no matter how good it is.

I live in Australia and use Whatsapp and so do lots of other people I know.

I'm not joking here, the only people I've seen use it are foreign exchange students, and I go to a university. I keep hearing how it's big, but then I don't see any real world use over here.

I also live in Australia and use Whatsapp all the time. Skype is way too heavyweight. Facebook ... I do not trust facebook at all, and do not wish to tie up my messaging capabilities with them.

> Also, everyone I know wouldn't pay for a communications protocol, no matter how good it is.

Dude, it's a dollar. One dollar. That's your contribution to the infrastructure that is handling 27 billion messages a day.

Was your phone free? Are your phone calls and SMS free? Is anything else in life free? I don't get it.

One of the big things though is that BBM is big over here in Indonesia and is the main selling point for Blackberry. It seems odd, but blackberries are consumer smartphones over here. This could go one of two ways:

1. BBM could become a larger service that Blackberry finds some other way to leverage, or

2. This could lead to the loss of the last few really major captive markets for BBM.

I don't think that Blackberry can survive withotu finding a way to leverage BBM in these markets.

Anonymity is still important to some though, since whatsapp by default uses phone number vs bbm's pin number, some users may shift to bbm. It is late, but may be not too late.

whats app has a huge privacy & security issue and their user are realizing it now so i hope BBM become their next choice .... it would be great if someone introduces true encryption though :)

I really like LINE better than Whatsapp.

Nobody uses LINE outside of East Asia.

i believe wechat and line are both bigger.

It's distributed on a very per-country basis. WhatsApp is used by over 90% of people in Spain, to the detriment of others. It shows how the success of this kind of thing depends more on network effects than on product quality - only one of them is exactly homogeneous across countries.

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