I'm not going to say this is the whole story, but... I recently tried XMPP on Pidgin for the first time on my laptop (Ubuntu), and I hate it. There's something

I'm not going to say this is the whole story, but... I recently tried XMPP on Pidgin for the first time on my laptop (Ubuntu), and I hate it. There's something very wrong and very ugly about the UI. It's feels just wrong. And not just that, I had to jump thru numerous hoops before I could get the thing working. I also recently tried to install Signal on my Xiaomi Redmi2, and it doesn't work. I don't know why but the registration always fails when "connecting to the servers", even though everything else on my phone works. (before I start getting responses about this, if your suggestion can be found on Google I already tried it) I think some things, like messaging where it's easy to create an MVP but hard to get the number of users that actually brings in the value, the entire game is polishing your one client to reduce frictions and increase experience. WhatsApp works as flawlessly on mi Redmi2 as it does on any Samsung or any iPhone. When you have zero friction to join over time your user base grows. When you have enormous friction to join, where users have to be wrestling with your broken app, it just fizzles. This isn't the case for every industry, but seems to be the case for messaging. Another example is Telegram. At one point they were ahead of WhatsApp in terms of features, now they're behind. Regardless, they keep growing their user base. My opinion is this is because their UX is at least as good as WhatsApp and has just as little friction.