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(Warning: totally uninformed comment ahead.)

IIRC, whatsapp is built on xmpp/jabber, which makes me think their web client uses WebRTC to connect to the service. WebRTC is supported fully natively on Android, but not on iOS. Specifically, Safari does not support it yet.

It's possible that this will work on iOS chrome but not iOS safari.

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Is WebRTC not browser to browser? Think websockets would be better suited for this problem.

Yes but you can't use all featuers in all browsers as far as I know. WebRTC in this case would be used to connect to TURN/STUN servers.

Again, no clue what I'm talking about. But I suspect the ability to support in-browser TURN/STUN handshakes is what's holding ios back.

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