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Hi, I am one of the editors of this story, and we have also thought about this. In my opinion, one of the reasons why WhatsApp hasn't become the "everything app
by itikasp 2y ago
Hi, I am one of the editors of this story, and we have also thought about this. In my opinion, one of the reasons why WhatsApp hasn't become the "everything app" in the US is because Apple/iOS devices are very popular in the country, where as in much of the world, Android is popular thanks to the availability of cheaper devices. Apple offers a suit of apps and features, including Facetime, that's not available for Android users, which adds to the popularity of WhatsApp.
- brudgers 2y agoFacetime was announced as an intended open standard. Shortly, Apple realized their advantage of keeping it closed.
- Uehreka 2y agoIdk how much of an advantage this has turned out to be. Like GP said, FaceTime is not as popular outside of the US because it isn’t on Android. Even its US popularity is limited by the fact that it doesn’t work with Android/PC users, mandating that you have another app (which likely works as well as FaceTime) on hand for those situations. I think this is more of an example of them shooting themselves in the foot for no advantage, but not caring because they have like 300 feet.
- Jtsummers 2y agoA patent lawsuit kept them from opening it up at the time. I think it's only recently been resolved.
- viraptor 2y agoThis is such a weird claim getting repeated. If they were infringing, opening the protocol wouldn't change that fact. They didn't even have to provide the client for other platforms, so their unit count wouldn't be increased for damages.
- Jtsummers 2y agoJobs' statement at the time was the intent to make it a published standard. If that standard was patent encumbered (or could be claimed to be, as the suit did) then it would be pretty hard to convince other people to implement that standard, and difficult to get a standards body to actually publish it. Why would Google, MS, or anyone else implement something if it'd get them bogged down in the same lawsuits Apple was already dealing with?
- viraptor 2y agoThere's lots of standards covered by patents. Gif included https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF
- Jtsummers 2y agoYes, which is a great example of a patent encumbered standard creating problems for people implementing the standard. Considering FaceTime postdates the GIF experience, I'm sure plenty of corporate lawyers understood the problem much better.
- toast0 2y agoAs a matter of policy, I avoid looking into details of patents, but from the title, I thought the patent was about something the server does, routing or something? In which case, infringement or licensing would scale with the number of users, not the number of shipped clients. This was around the same time that Apple was charging for OS upgrades, at least on Mac, and I think they wouldn't have wanted to pay for something they were providing for free.
- viraptor 2y agoMaking the protocol a standard doesn't mean they have to accept every client. They already restrict that.
- 2y ago
- loloquwowndueo 2y agoAn interesting tidbit is that WhatsApp actually predates FaceTime and iMessage, and thus it was one of the earliest iPhone apps that allowed sending text messages over data as opposed to SMS. Interoperability with Android was a plus. I was tremendously pissed off when I moved from a BlackBerry (with blackberry messenger and “free over data” messaging) to an iPhone in 2008 and had to go back to paying per sms sent. The moment WhatsApp became available I got it (and paid for it!) and have been using it ever since. I wonder what other iPhone users did for data messaging before iMessage became available.
- epx 2y agoAt least here in Brazil, WhatsApp consolidated its position by working well in feature phones that ran J2ME and dominated the low-end market before Android. It took testing and adaptation to each and every available phone (as far as I can remember, J2ME was kind of a loose standard so developing a J2ME on one device did not guarantee it ran well, or at all, in any other). This, coupled with the possibility of eliding the outrageous SMS rates and the availability of EDGE data plans.
- toast0 2y agoWhatsApp ran on Nokia S40, which is J2ME, but it did not run on other J2ME phones (unless there was some way to put the s40 app bundle on them? I never heard about that). There was a period of time where someone was selling low end phones with an unauthorized and incomplete client built in... In addition to not supporting group messages, it apparently had a backdoor to remote send spam.
- Zak 2y agoI found it surprising at the time that instant messaging apps that originated on PCs (ICQ, AIM, Skype, etc...) did not get widely adopted for this role despite most of the well-known ones releasing iOS and Android versions at the time.
- hocuspocus 2y agoICQ and AIM were pretty much dead already. Microsoft really missed an opportunity, I remember using a third party app for Messenger and the mobile experience wasn't great. Skype was too focused on voice and video calls, not seen as an instant messaging app, even though it could very well have been. The biggest fumble really comes from Google though. I was using Google Talk as my main messaging app on PC, and Android had pretty much everything ready before iOS, including video chat over 3G. However Google went through a pointless revamp with Hangouts and never managed a convincing SMS integration.
- orf 2y agoIt’s pretty simple: SMS functionality sucked and was super expensive. Before WhatsApp there was blackberry messenger (BBM). When I was growing up kids were running around with blackberry phones, marketed at businessmen, purely for BBM. WhatsApp was just this, except on a platform that didn’t suck. WhatsApp also predates iMessage and FaceTime.
- lostlogin 2y ago> WhatsApp also predates iMessage and FaceTime. I was surprised to find this accurate. Though the lineage for a Mac user would likely include Messages and iChat, which go back further. iChat: 2002 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IChat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IChat Messages: 2007 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messages_(Apple) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messages_(Apple) iMessage: 2011 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMessage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMessage WhatsApp: 2009 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp
- emchammer 2y agoTidbit: The original iChat had an IPv6 link-local messaging function which worked entirely without Internet access or servers.
- steve1977 2y agoThere also was an iChat server for Mac OS X Server IIRC.
- steve1977 2y agoBut those were not mobile services, more like Apple's implementation of ICQ or MSN Messenger.
- akira2501 2y agoDo you think it could be that general purpose computers tend to exist as household items here moreso than in other parts of the world? I see my phone as a small extension of a much larger and more capable computing base. Is that view even possible in other parts of the world?
- mixmastamyk 2y agoMost folks no longer need a general purpose computer, like they once did to participate.
- okanat 2y agoWhatsApp was there before Apple. There was even Symbian versions of it. The reason it got so popular in other counties is the extortionate pricing of SMSes. WhatsApp used (and still uses) very little data and with the lowest level data tariff you would still get more messaging quota. Moreover it costed nothing when WiFi on phones became a thing. Then sending pictures for free became a thing too. They were also a smaller company and it didn't bother people to pay a small amount for all of the benefits they got.
- josu 2y agoThe US was one of the few countries in the world where there were unlimited SMS plans. So by the time Whatsapp came around instant free messaging was already ubiquitous. This wasn't the case for most other regions, where Whatsapp actually brought free unlimited mobile messaging.
- comprev 2y agoWhatsApp was a paid product to start with.
- notahacker 2y agoIt cost ~$1 (initially a one time fee, later joiners paid annually). Depending on your SMS plan, that might be paid for with the first 10 messages you sent. There was zero additional cost to use to send a lot of messages, including pictures and group messages. This was quite different to most mobile contracts at the time
- viraptor 2y agoIt wasn't even enforced though. Charged only after a year, but you could reinstall and get another year free.
- lxgr 2y agoI've used it at that time, and somehow they never managed to actually charge me (and I didn't go out of my way to avoid paying).
- carlosroman101 2y agoNot sure how true this is as I had unlimited SMS in the UK in 2000. I struggled to keep that plan as the original provider got bought by O2. Luckily when it happened lots of providers provided enough SMS that was basically "unlimited". The problem for me was the cost of accessing no wap web pages.
- lxgr 2y agoImportantly these also usually included unlimited media messages (MMS) early on. Flat rate plans in Europe started appearing a bit later and usually never included MMS, so it was calls and texts only, but no photos. WhatsApp changed that.
- theshackleford 2y agoEven in my country where iOS reigns supreme, there is very minimal usage of regular SMS/iOS messages functionality. Almost everyone uses some kind of 3rd party app.
- throw310822 2y ago> because Apple/iOS devices are very popular in the country Apple is popular also in Europe, and Android has a 43% market share in the US. But in Europe nobody would use a messaging system that is broken for 40% of their contacts. So either in the US there is no intersection between the social circles of people that use Android vs Apple (highly improbable) or something in the US culture makes people willing to cripple their own experience in order to impose a tax on those in the outgroup.
- immibis 2y agoI read a comment recently on Hacker News that a pesticide or herbicide popular in the US and banned in the EU also happened to be an endocrine disruptor in humans, for a hormone responsible for empathy (oxytocin). Don't know if it's true.
- ikr678 2y agoThe 'something in US culture' is conspicuous consumption and a perception that apple are superior and you shouldnt have to go out of your way to interact with poor android users.
- throw310822 2y agoI wonder if this is somehow related with the healthcare policies: a country where everyone is willing to pay extortionate prices for medical care, sometimes to the point of financial ruin, so that those who are "undeserving" don't get it for free.
- lxgr 2y agoSMS/MMS is free in almost all phone plans in the US, and I have absolutely no trouble believing that people would subject themselves to a very bad messaging experience if that's the default that comes with their phone, as long as it's free. If I were to come up with a social/economic theory to further back that, my guess would probably be that phone users in the US have a "full service mentality" much more than in the rest of the world: Buying a phone on a (very expensive) monthly plan that subsidizes the device is much more common than elsewhere, and historically, SIM cards weren't even a thing, so devices were tied to a given network and (to some extent) even a subscriber much more than in the rest of the world. That would logically extend to people not expecting to have to install a third-party app for what they consider to be "basic phone functionality".
- jorvi 2y agoWhatsApp has not become the "everything app" in the EU either? People use it for chatting with people, groups of people, or businesses. Virtually no one uses the Status or Communities feature. I have 289 people in my phone book right now, 1 of them occasionally posts on Status when on vacation. Of 25 people I quickly checked with, not one of them uses Communities.
- immibis 2y agoThis. It's just a replacement SMS and phone app. It's not an everything app.
- lxgr 2y agoI vaguely remember hearing that status updates are much more popular in other markets. I could imagine the same for channels, as WhatsApp is zero-rated on many data plans in the developing world (as well as for in-flight Wi-Fi plans in more and more airlines!), which would make that an economical way of staying up to date on news.
- Yeul 2y agoApple could release a fully functional iMessage for Android if they wanted to- hell the EU council would send them a cake if they did that. One can speculate why they don't.
- hocuspocus 2y agoThe EU doesn't care. The DMA doesn't apply to iMessage, its market share is too small.