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It's a phone based messaging medium. If you have a phone number, you can send a message. That's not nothing. I know the phone numbers of far more people than

It's a phone based messaging medium. If you have a phone number, you can send a message. That's not nothing. I know the phone numbers of far more people than I know the name of their apple account, or google account, or facebook account, or whatever. The general answer to that is to exchange account information, but the easiest way to do that is through SMS... and here we are. Upgrading SMS so it's better. It's not perfect, but I'm happy for any advances they can make to it. And as for why it's not encrypted end-to-end, the spec started back in 2008. That wasn't even on most people's radar back then. It's possible once we see some actual uptake of the protocol, we might see some more movement towards adding features (continuously adding features before something is in use is just a good way to make sure it never actually makes it into use).

telcodud 7y ago
Knowing someone's phone number means you can reach them on WhatsApp. At least, that's true for 2B (out of 5B) of phone numbers, which is likely to be 1,000 times the number of RCS users. The second and most important advantage of WhatsApp is that you don't have to maintain an address book anymore. People change phone numbers and the new number is automatically reflected in WhatsApp. It's quite likely that address books on phones are outdated and thus stale.
- kbenson 7y ago
  > Knowing someone's phone number means you can reach them on WhatsApp ...that would be super useful if I had WhatsApp installed. It also means that WhatsApp is tracking the phone number of all the people and doing selective (assuming only your friends can see it) publishing of it. I guess that's usually okay, but it also kinda wierds me out that it leaks info that way. My phone number is already managed by me, I've given it to the people I want to have it. This really just limits any WhatsApp messaging I would to to entities that I want to have my phone number. It's probably much easier to block WhatsApp accounts (and attempted messages) than calls (phone calls which are synchronous communication have a much higher urgency to me than some random phone ding that's async).
- ta999999171 7y ago
  ...valuable if you conveniently forget who owns WhatsApp.

telcodud 7y ago

Knowing someone's phone number means you can reach them on WhatsApp. At least, that's true for 2B (out of 5B) of phone numbers, which is likely to be 1,000 times the number of RCS users. The second and most important advantage of WhatsApp is that you don't have to maintain an address book anymore. People change phone numbers and the new number is automatically reflected in WhatsApp. It's quite likely that address books on phones are outdated and thus stale.

kbenson 7y ago
> Knowing someone's phone number means you can reach them on WhatsApp ...that would be super useful if I had WhatsApp installed. It also means that WhatsApp is tracking the phone number of all the people and doing selective (assuming only your friends can see it) publishing of it. I guess that's usually okay, but it also kinda wierds me out that it leaks info that way. My phone number is already managed by me, I've given it to the people I want to have it. This really just limits any WhatsApp messaging I would to to entities that I want to have my phone number. It's probably much easier to block WhatsApp accounts (and attempted messages) than calls (phone calls which are synchronous communication have a much higher urgency to me than some random phone ding that's async).
ta999999171 7y ago
...valuable if you conveniently forget who owns WhatsApp.