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Whatsapp doesn't. I'd say this was huge at driving its adoption.
by nly 11y ago
Whatsapp doesn't. I'd say this was huge at driving its adoption.
- GFischer 11y agoTying the username to the phone number was brilliant, and I don't know why others hadn't succeeded before with that approach, or why don't others copy it. It is quite annoying when you want to switch phone numbers though (not a common use case, but at least in my country if you want to switch providers you have to switch phone numbers).
- harryf 11y agoWhat's probably slowed adoption of that approach is too much "web thinking" in the app design process and too much "But what does Google / Facebook / Twitter do?" In fact Twitter provides SMS based signup as a free service for app developers as part of Fabric - https://get.digits.com/ https://get.digits.com/
- Angostura 11y agoFrom what I recall, however Whatsapp won't let me dip my toe in the water on IOS without full access to all my Contacts. It got uninstalled pretty quick.
- nly 11y agoYeah, an option to selectively add contacts would have been great but logically that would require an OS provided contact picker. Does either iOS or Android provide such a beast with an appropriate API? If not, you can't exactly blame Whatsapp for wanting a nice experience for users.