It's not really "pop" technology. Surprisingly, it's not used much in the United States, but in India it's basically a replacement for text messaging. Everyone from a 13 year old child to my grand mom uses it to keep in touch with friends and family members across the globe.
IMHO, they were able to get to such widespread everyday usage because they such awesome and reliable technology. Much better than what Google have been able to provide with their hangouts app, for instance. Messages are always delivered instantaneously if you are online. If you are offline it stores it locally, and delivers it the moment you are online without messing up the order.
Never had any issues with them. They are really awesome. Congrats to them - IMO it's a great acquisition by Facebook.
My mom thinks whatsapp is the internet. That's the only app she knows how to use. I have standing instructions to recharge(pay the monthly internet fee) the "whatsapp" every month.
In Romania many acquaintances used it, but most of them have switched to Facebook's messenger. As I was saying in another comment, if I open my WhatsApp right now, most of the people listed as being on WhatsApp have probably uninstalled it, so there's a very real possibility that messages won't ever reach their target, whereas the new Facebook Messenger for Android is catching on like fire.
In my opinion, this is probably the dumbest acquisition I've ever seen.
When they say "450 million monthly active users worldwide and over 320 million daily active users", it's probably safe to assume that they have discarded inactive users. That's also depending on what their definition of inactive means (e.g. have not used whatsapp in 3 months?)
I had to join WhatsApp because most of relatives on Facebook moved on to WhatsApp and there are atleast like 6-7 groups on my WhatsApp. Friends, Office colleagues, cousins and other people.
I'm rarely seeing FB updates from my friends these days. Most of it happens on WhatsApp channels.
So its not a surprise FB bought them. Because if they don't they risk losing all users to WhatsApp, at least that's how it is here in India.
I'm in Ecuador and most young people (which is a lot here, the average age is 26) use a combination of Whatsapp, FB and SMS. Ex-pats avoid SMS as they are usually on pay-as-you-go plans on $20 phones.
It can't be like this forever, as the network effect leans towards a single messaging solution, the carriers will lose their hold on SMS as a revenue stream. But this will depend heavily on universal Internet access.
As one of those expats (starting my 8th year in a little fishing village in pacific coastal ecuador), can I just say --
We're on pay-as-you-go plans, but usually on nice phones we brought unlocked from our home countries. I'm typing this on my trusty Air, which is tethered through an unlocked iPhone 4S.
I'm also listening to waves crash. We got our first swell in a month yesterday, and non-locals are showing up a day late ... 4 or 5 of them. A crowd. I was the only one out for the good stuff yesterday, and I sucked the marrow out of it, and am instead enjoying sitting on my balcony drinking coffee and vagando here on HN. Ahhh.
Where was I? Oh, yes.
I can confirm the crazy-fast penetration of both smartphones in general (probably way over 90% android), WhatsApp in particular, and the FB/WhatsApp/SMS mix.
So WhatsApp isn't the internet here yet. But it's definitely got brand parity with Facebook around here. Which is pretty amazing considering their relative valuations.
I live in Bangalore too! It's just that most of my friends are moving from WhatsApp to Viber and remaining will hopefully move now. I have around 10 groups running from school, boarding, college, jobs and some more.
Fb buying them is a deal breaker. None of my "well read" friends are going to trust WhatsApp with those nude photos, short pornos or very very personal information we share.
I don't know. Facebook just looks like a desperate chap.
The value in Skype, WhatsApp, etc. is the vast amount of work and codebase that goes into punching holes in routers/gateways/NATs to make the internet actually work like it was originally designed.
WhatsApp is not p2p, they maintain a constant server connection which is not a problem for routers/gateways/NATs because its initiated from the client side.
Spam prevention is not strictly a security problem, or if you choose to frame it that way it is entirely unlike most other system security challenges. Almost all spam prevention systems have some sort of secret sauce involved, otherwise spammers could train their own systems against it to discover what works. In other words, this is why most open-source security products are extremely competitive with (if not outright better than) their closed-source counterparts, but open-source spam prevention systems (with no disrespect to the people who work hard on them, because as I said, it's a hard problem) suck.
Security through obscurity is not an invalid strategy. If the capabilities of your adversary are low (e.g., bottomfeeding spammers) and the obscurity changes often (e.g., churn in API) it can work just fine.
Trillian! Seriously...ok, I get that these apps like WhatsApp, Viper got tons of users, but please don't give me no BS about them innovating. Trillian solved that problem a long long long long time ago.
I used to really like Trillian, iirc even payed for it once upon a time, but haven't used it in forever... most of my family and a lot of my friends are all on FB, so I check there once in a while.. anyone else will SMS/text me.
If anything, I think I've used google hangouts than most of the other IM platforms lately.
More importantly, XMPP has problems delivering the text-message-like experience. It's more of a live-chat protocol. If you want to receive messages when you're offline, things rapidly become a mess.
They shouldn't, though, because pretty much every XMPP server I've seen has user-offline message storage for later delivery eg [1], [2], and the "best practices" have been documented for years, e.g. [3].
Unless you actually mean "receive messages [to your device] when you're offline" and how the hell would that work?
fortunately there is improvement in sight: XEP-313 Message Archive Management [0] allows a client to fetch the backlog from its server, at the (privacy) cost of having all your messages stored on the server.
By the time smartphones were widely adopted in the US, SMS already had massive market penetration. Trying to adopt something else when your entire social network already uses SMS is a losing game.
This is why, IMO, Apple, Google and Facebook are the only companies really in a position to change the messaging game in the US. There is space for newcomers (see: Snapchat), but they're going to have to work hard to spread beyond their initial niche.
Apple is driving iMessage adoption via iOS, albeit mostly only for messaging between iOS devices. Facebook has a solid mobile install base already, but they can't seem to figure out how to convince users to use Facebook messaging. It actually works really well for me, but no one I know actually uses it.
Google seems to be in the process of merging Hangouts and SMS. They're already the same app on Android, but you get to pick the protocol. Their logical endgame is to move all messaging to the Hangouts protocol, and fall back to Google Voice to deliver messages to users who don't have a Hangouts client.
If Google can pull this off I think they're going to absolutely kill it, but they seem to be having a lot of execution problems.
I don't know, SMS was huge in Germany as well, there were unlimited plans etc., still, today everyone uses WhatsApp. Group messages, broadcasts, media, cross-platform, and it's of course easier to convince people to use WhatsApp than Facebook.
I lived in the US for a while, and I can't really come up with any reason why it should be different there. Only that way more people are on Facebook (and those are also way more active). Still, I can't really explain why texts stuck around even for smartphone users.
Hm, I could imagine that for those with smartphones unlimited SMS plans came maybe a bit later in Germany than in the US.
When I was shopping for a mobile phone plan for my sister four years ago unlimited SMS were hard to find. Sure, now you get them everywhere, but I don’t think standard smartphone contracts had them four years ago. You had to pay obscenely more (something like double the monthly cost) if you could get unlimited SMS at all. I remember that the high cost of SMS were a real sticking point for my sister.
In my experience smartphone contracts in Germany tended to be much cheaper than in the US but you would also get substantially less for your money. That’s still the case today with included unthrottled data volume.
So maybe that’s one reason why Whatsapp took off. Another one I can think of is that Germany is less of an iOS monoculture than the US. Android is more widespread, so iMessage frequently gets you no benefit at all.
SMS was (still is) huge in the UK too, but all of my friends started using WhatsApp because you could send pictures to each other on WhatsApp without having to use MMS which cost more, was always a hassle to set up and wasn't available on every phone back in the beginning.
I'm in the UK and I'd never heard of WhatsApp until now. I wonder if a lot of these people who say 'X app is big in my country' actually just mean 'X app is popular within my social circle'.
> I wonder if a lot of these people who say 'X app is big in my country' actually just mean 'X app is popular within my social circle'.
Yes, that is exactly what it means unless there's some research data provided. Obviously it is easier to scale our current surroundings to the whole country, than to really go around and see how things are outside our social circle. Then again, same applies to you too, just because you haven't heard of WhatsApp before doesn't mean it wouldnt be big in the UK. :)
In Spain, SMS was also the main way of communicating with mobile phones (pre- and post-smartphone). The benefit of WhatsApp was that you didn't have to move to a different "social network" with usernames and stuff, it just used your contact list, and that it didn't cost anything besides your internet connection. So if someone had WhatsApp, you used that, otherwise you texted them through SMS. You almost end up avoiding communicating with people that don't have WhatsApp because they cost you money...
Really? Telegram is a trend? In India I doubt many people even heard about it.
I think I will give it a serious thought if it open sources its code base or otherwise it's as good as Viber or Line as an alternative. Same goes with helm.is.
In Romania WhatsApp is fairly popular, but it's declining. About 60% of my phone's contacts have had it installed at some point, but I noticed that many of them have uninstalled it.
Its popularity has been declining due to Facebook and Android - Facebook on Android works really well lately, most of my acquaintances are on Facebook already and everybody with an Android (which is most of my acquaintances) has either Facebook or Facebook Messenger on it. This is happening because Facebook is the messenger that finally dethroned Yahoo Messenger in my country - really, I'm serious, Yahoo Messenger was still really popular until about 2 years ago. And Android penetration has been phenomenal, due to cheap models being advertised by mobile carriers and sold instead of feature phones.
> Their logical endgame is to move all messaging to the Hangouts protocol, and fall back to Google Voice to deliver messages to users who don't have a Hangouts client.
You're a US citizen and so you might have missed the part where Google Voice is not available outside the US - no alternative can win over SMS, unless it is international.
I actually hate them for trying to take over my SMS messaging and I'm glad that I still have the option of not allowing them to do it on my Android, even though I'm also a regular Hangouts user. What is it with these companies trying to be everything to everybody?
re: your last thought. Google isn't really taking over your SMS messaging in Hangouts as it stands with their current implementation. If you enable "Hangouts SMS" -- it's really just a client side merge of the SMS and Hangouts UI (i.e. SMS does not flow through Google's servers). It just makes it easier to manage SMS and Hangouts conversations side by side through the same app.
I saw that, but if you take a look at the wording they use for denial ("Maybe Later"), that's what they did every single time before shoving it down on all customers' throats. Plus, that question pops up every single time Hangouts gets updated and there's no way to make it stop, because surprise, you can't uninstall Hangouts. The message on the wall is very clear - in future versions of Android Hangouts will be the SMS app.
> It just makes it easier to manage SMS and Hangouts conversations side by side through the same app.
No it doesn't, it's actually quite confusing. At some point I sent a message to my wife, without paying attention if it's SMS or not and so I sent it by Hangouts because that's the default, but she's not using her Google account at all and never received the message. And you have to pay attention like every single time.
It's much, much easier to separate services, when they are in fact different. For SMS, I open the SMS app and I send and receive SMS messages. For Hangouts, I open the Hangouts app and I send and receive Hangouts messages. When I'm not sure what protocol to use for somebody, I go to that contact's details and check out the available options. If I have to read new messages, I click on the notification. If I want to reply to a new message, I'm already in the right app. What could be simpler than that?
Trying to combine Hangouts or any other SMS alternative with SMS in the same app is first of all a huge usability fail - unless that service would fallback to SMS in case delivery didn't happen, in which case there's always the question of unexpected billing, because your phone number is going to have to send that SMS and SMS can get quite expensive - so no, it's an epic failure.
The problem with what Google or Facebook do is that deep down I know it's going to be integrated into their main product, and I won't be able to use it without sharing my real name and friends and everything else tied to the account. Or it will make me create an account, pick yet another password, fill out a profile, yadda yadda. Just thinking about it makes me sleepy.
Why can't it just be simple? Get the app and pick a phone number to message. The SMS situation is so bad that it's got a giant flashing neon sign "Disrupt me please" all over it yet none of the big players are stepping up.
I thought it was the de facto messaging app across the world?
There is no such thing. IM is extremely fragmented into local markets, and you will find different solutions being the de-facto solutions at different locations.
For reference, I'm from Europe and outside the Netherlands I have never heard of anyone using Whatsapp. I tried it once, and it found 2 contacts among my 100s. It was instantly deleted as it was of no use to me.
I also remember it causing stability issues with my Android-phone, ensuring I will never ever install it on anything I own ever, for life, unless my primary intent is ruining that device.
What's "hot" here, or at least what I've heard of people using is MSN, Skype, FB Messenger, Hangouts, Twitter(!) and IRC.
I can only speak for myself, but in the US I have never seen any need for it. I text or iMessage with my friends, and while I have had WhatsApp installed for a long time, I've never found something it does better for me. If I needed to communicate with people I couldn't text with, or if I were paying per text, it would probably be more compelling.
Well, to give you an example, here in Argentina, almost everyone in my phone's contact list uses WhatsApp. Here, the fact that you pay per message is a big incentive. But there are other advantages, like instant delivery, being sure that the message was received (double-check), better feedback ('X is online' when using the app, 'Last seen at 09:22', X is writing...), media sharing, groups, etc. simple things that help a lot. Also, it works both on iPhone and Android...
In Brazil, sometimes a SMS message takes hours to arrive. My bank sometimes send a validation code by SMS, but I can't use it because it expires before arriving.
Still struggling to figure out why it's so popular. I read the other article[1] on the front page suggesting that the reason for the popularity is that the app works on low end handsets. But then so does SMS. Is the design of WhatsApp so much better than built in SMS, or is it just the fact that WhatsApp is free? [For me and most people I know SMS is virtually free, but I guess that's not the case around the world]
- It's not 10c/p per message which if you're talking a lot adds up.
- You can send photos and videos and they show up in the stream. MMS isn't actually configured for most people even if it didn't cost 50c a message.
- It does group messaging.
- Avatars, UI etc
The reason it's popular over apps I think is largely down to savvy use of network effects, particularly that your username is your phone number, so it can scan your phone book and instantly show you who you know that has it. Plus it's available on iPhone, Android, Blackberry and as that article at the top of the main page says, J2ME (news to me but I'm in Europe so not that many feature phones around these days).
I'm from the UK but live in Barcelona and it has 97% penetration here.
[For me and most people I know SMS is virtually free, but I guess that's not the case around the world]
Define virtually free? I pay like 10 bucks a month for unlimited SMS, that's hardly virtually free!!! If I didn't they cost like 10 cents a message. That's an insane price for sending or receiving a very very small message that costs the phone companies almost nothing to send. I see it working well for say prepaid plans or barebones plans.
I would pay maybe £0.09 per SMS if I wasn't on contract. As it is, I am, but I still have to pay to get a delivery notification - that's £0.01 per message or £0.02 depending on your contract. I send maybe 100 messages per day on Whatsapp and probably about 3 texts.
Also, where I live (UK) literally everyone I know who has a smartphone is on Whatsapp. It's completely ubiquitous.
IMHO, they were able to get to such widespread everyday usage because they such awesome and reliable technology. Much better than what Google have been able to provide with their hangouts app, for instance. Messages are always delivered instantaneously if you are online. If you are offline it stores it locally, and delivers it the moment you are online without messing up the order.
Never had any issues with them. They are really awesome. Congrats to them - IMO it's a great acquisition by Facebook.