- many of my family members, especially in developing world, bought a smartphone solely as a reason to be on WhatsApp. Nothing convinced them before to buy one. Once they had it, they discovered other awesome uses of a smartphone and are part of the "mobile revolution"(TM). That alone should qualify for "changing the world".
- no one I know uses SMS anymore (again, developing countries). A great change given the price gouging before (and Americans probably won't understand that if you haven't seen it first hand).
- Amount of "support" happening on WhatsApp in the broader economy - (eg. booking a taxi, ordering home delivery from corner grocery store etc - which needed a phone call before and was not as smooth as WhatsApp experience)
- hyper-sharing of casual moments in life. I know, I know - there was facebook and picasa and whatnot before that and instagram/snap these days, but amount of photo sharing that happens on WhatsApp is 2 to 3 orders of magnitude higher than what came before or other channels (again, developing countries), simply because WhatsApp made it super simple to share compared to predecessors and is ubiquitous compared to other contemporaries.
It should also be noted that WhatsApp needed two big giant shoulders to stand upon:
- android and affordable phones (sorry, iPhone simply doesn't cut the deal for the masses)
- 2G / 3G spectrum and data connectivity
Before Whatsapp, my friends in various African countries and their correspondents spent sometimes hundreds of Euros a month in voice communications. After Whatsapp: zero. It happened overnight.
Quite a few chat applications worked as well, but one cannot overstate how radically Whatsapp has changed international voice for users and telcos alike. That is not just success in entertainment but a significant social impact.
The telegraph changed the world, so did cellphones. Cheaper messaging or HDTV did not.
The difference is really one of capability not minor quality improvements. Otherwise you get into things like calling every single new generation of graphics cards as revolutionary not evolutionary.
Arguably they 'won' because Skype was sold to Microsoft in 2009 creating a huge opening. But, it hardly changed the world even if it did save some people quite a bit of money.
PS: I suspect people will have the same conversation in 10 years about a company created around 2014 when Whatsapp was sold.
According to wiki: According to the Financial Times, WhatsApp "has done to SMS on mobile phones what Skype did to international calling on landlines."[167]
Seems pretty world changing in terms of providing a core communication service to 1/7 of the human population
(note that i don't use whatsapp and am not all that familiar with it. mostly i'm aware of it due to an interest in erlang.)