-you download the app and can immediately get started after verifying your phone number (no ID or password required) -you don't need to share any ID or connection details other than just your phone number
I spend a lot of time in India, and I think this lack of complexity has contributed significantly to its virality (I'd estimate that a pretty significant percentage of the user base does not have or regularly use an email account, which is usually a prerequisite to setting up many accounts).
That stayed true for a few years, and so WhatsApp became the de facto standard for messaging.
I can’t speak for other countries but in South Africa that’s why. And the rest is just networking effects.
My phone number is an ID. An ID I don't want to share. An ID that can be stolen by calling the phone company and saying you're me and bought a new SIM.
Most people who meet each other in real life and want to exchange contact information exchange… you guessed it… a phone number. Maybe you exchange email or twitter handle, but again you are an exception here. So imagine we meet for the first time and we exchange phone numbers. Now I can WhatsApp you, just like that no other account info needed.
It seems to be available on cheap feature phones now anyway: https://www.gizbot.com/mobile/features/fnord-047499.html
Whatsapp grew big with customers of telcos like Vodafone, which may be less capable than Mark Zuckerberg's snoopshop but I wouldn't bet on their being nicer. See https://toroid.org/vodafone-smtp-mitm for example.
https://www.gadgetsnow.com/tech-news/Indias-cheapest-Android...
And there's a fair choice for under 1500INR
Now sure you can get a non-whatsapp phone for half that price, but it's pretty cheap
Plus free international text messages.
That’s is how they grew to a billion users without being a success in either the USA or China.
Edit: While there are free email solutions that provide free push, you are either tied to the platform or are made to download an email app, which just makes WhatsApp an easier to use alternative, even if your use case is just spamming groups with pictures or video.
Except that this is a feature of every messaging app. It's not really a response to
>> It also has no killer features in comparison to any existing messaging app, nor the defunct MSN.
When WhatsApp first came around sending SMS in many places like in Europe was not free. It wasn’t free to send SMS to other people from the same country, and Europeans, especially European Students going to university will typically have friends or contacts with different country codes because they didn’t get a new SIM card for various reasons. It wasn’t free to SMS people in the same country, and it was not free to SMS people from other countries.
WhatsApp changed that, without needing you to sign up for an account somewhere and telling people “my AIM is this” or “my email is that.” You were already giving people your phone number when you met them, and WhatsApp was compatible with that. So it requires no extra steps. Just download the app and go and now you can SMS people for free using the contact information you already have, using the contact information you were most likely to give to people you just met.
That was the appeal.
No it isn't. WhatsApp is a replacement for sms, while other software is (or at least was) always some kind of internet messenger that now also runs on your phone.
It wasn't 11 years ago.
The only thing SMS offered was that the other person didn't need to be running anything. WhatsApp didn't offer that, and also didn't improve on the other messengers of the day.
Essentially, 95% of the reasons WhatsApp was successful were things you glossed over here.
And it still is. Even cheap feature phones often have WhatsApp support.
When Whatsapp started out, it was free only for the first year; after that, they wanted a payment. What this experiment has shown, that people did very short term decision without regards for long term.
I reluctantly installed WhatsApp only after everybody around me started using it, or (the more tech savvy among them who already knew how to "open the internet"), switched away from Facebook to WhatsApp.
Everybody who had a phone also naturally had a phone number, and the phone numbers of their friends were already stored on the phone. Nobody outside the "nerd sphere" had a Gmail account 10 years ago, especially not outside the US.
PS: I don't remember ever paying money to WhatsApp, I think that was a short-lived experiment that didn't work out right before the Facebook acquisition.
In 2011 I was a student in university and I had friends in my circle from Erasmus so they kept their phone number from their own country. In 2011 it wasn’t even free for me to send a sms to people from my own country so I couldn’t even imagine sending sms to people internationally even though they were physically in the same city as me.
Well one day a friend told me to download WhatsApp. So I did. All it wanted me to do was verify my phone number and that’s it.
Now suddenly all of my friends with smart phones could just sms me for free. And I could sms them back too. For free.
That was the value of WhatsApp. The fact that all you needed was a phone number, which you already had saved in your phone. Now instead of opening your phones messages app, you just open whatsapp.
There was no extra step of signing up for a new account or telling people “search for my name on Facebook my profile picture is blah blah.”
Frequent flyers weren't particularly enthusiastic
"It appears that this requires the other party to also have the app installed, right?"
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-technology/952359-tho...
The only time I get an SMS now is for specific multi-factor authentications or automated updates from companies. A lot of businesses even do their live support through Whatsapp now.
I prefer a slight barrier before I'm interrupted and don't mind paying the cost of sending a message. On top of that I don't like non-regulated foreign companies looking over my shoulder. That this is a non-standard pattern I'm well aware of but it suits me just fine.
If you're on a pre-paid plan then SMS doesn't just cost money. It's actually a finite amount you can send before you need to up it. Whereas Whatsapp can function on WiFi. So that can be a big deal if you have urgency.
> I don't like non-regulated foreign companies looking over my shoulder
I mean sure. You have to trust Facebook that the end-to-end encryption has no backdoors. But SMS is known for being intercepted really easyily.
Now that I think about it I’m not sure if “apping” implies texting, voice call, or video call. Lol
Usually it's "I'll send you a Whatsappie", "I'll whatsapp you" or "I'll app you".
E.g. the parents of our daughter's class uses a WhatsApp group. You can decide not to join it, but you will miss out on all kinds of activities people plan together for kids, school-related messages, etc.
Similarly, our larger family uses a WhatsApp group to stay in touch, coordinate our the bi-yearly family outing, etc.
And this goes on and on, basically everyone communicates through WhatsApp groups. If you do not join them, you miss out on a lot of social activities, etc.
I wish WhatsApp just stayed independent and charged $1 per year, which they did irregularly before they were bought by Facebook.
Perhaps you mean "server availability/reliability"?
The only thing Whatsapp could do, without reaching deeply into the system, is to retry sending messages over and over, until they are sent. If other messengers give up early, then perhaps that could create a false impression of improved connectivity.
https://matrix.org/blog/2019/03/12/breaking-the-100-bps-barr...
Do you claim WA reaches that deeply into the system on phones?
Not sure whom I poked the wrong way this time, but it would surely be good to have explanation.
It is now redundant but that was not the case 10 years ago. People just stick with it since there is little incentive to adapt anything else. WhatsApp just works.
Its killer feature was what it did before it was acquired by FB, really not much difference since then. The killer feature was international messaging without SMS/MMS costs (and poor reliability) and only needing a phone number, so you could take it with you easily as you moved through devices so long as you controlled the same number. This got presence around the globe making it easy to message almost anyone, almost anywhere.
There is option in Chats\media visibility to not trash your photo folder
not sure what are you using what is safer and/or does not require phone number