The solution is always the same, focus on a stellar UX.

Stellar UX are always welcomed, But the network effects of a chat application are too high of a variable for to just rely on stellar UX to be successful.

Case in point: There was a chat app called Hike[1] in India run by the son of the leading Telecom Billionaire. It had more features(free SMS, Stickers) and arguably better UX than WhatsApp according to its users(100M). But it could never gain over WhatsApp's initial market size in India(Why change what works?).

Final nail on the coffin for Hike was when WhatsApp was made available on the 4G feature phone released by a competing Telecom operator and loads of people got to experience WhatsApp on their first ever Internet enabled compute device.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hike_Messenger

That's a very good example of why net-neutrality and anti-monopoly principles are important. Thanks for bringing it up

Thanks, It's indeed a good example for how oligopoly in telecom stifle innovation and how not even well-funded startups can survive in it.

Monopoly or Duopoly is a straight death sentence to innovation.

> Monopoly or Duopoly

Yeah or any kind of cartel, really. It's hard enough for a small coop to fight economies of scale, but in many areas you're facing an actual mafia.

Somewhat off-topic, but what's the situation with DIY non-profit ISPs in India? If you're not familiar with the topic, you can look up NYCMesh (New York), Guifi (Spain), Freifunk (Germany), FFDN Federation (France) or Rhizomatica (Mexico). Another interesting development in the telecoms field is https://jmp.chat/ promoting and developing free-software for cellphone<->XMPP/SIP interoperability.

ISPs by itself are heavily scrutinized entities in India, Even Starlink hasn't able to get its license yet AFAIK. I've seen couple of small for-profit ISPs come up and disappear in the form of both non-innovative distributors of bigger ISP and innovative original technology ISPs like WiFi Dabba(YC)[1](Not disappeared, but changed USP from mobile Internet to home broadband & moved the HQ from B'lore to Delaware).

As for non-profit ISP, even if possible it definitely cannot be open i.e. without oversight as in the examples from other countries you've sighted. Closest I've come to community run networks I've seen are LoRA networks.

jmp looks great, Google Voice has been shutdown in India can I use jmp as a replacement?

Edit: I've submitted jmp to HN as I didn't see any large discussions on it.

[1] https://www.wifidabba.com/

> non-profit ISP (...) cannot be open i.e. without oversight

That's also the case here. In France you need to declare your ISP activity to the telecoms regulator and follow some regulations. In Germany too there are regulations, but Freifunk as an activist collective ignored them in order to protect their users' privacy, and went up to the supreme court and won their right to operate a privacy-friendly ISP.

> jmp looks great, Google Voice has been shutdown in India can I use jmp as a replacement?

JMP is great from what i heard. It may not be as featureful as Google Voice yet, but there's active development and the user support (i hang out in their channel despite not being a client) is the best i've seen across the entire telecoms industry, and by far. The maintainers are very happy to work on new features and open to suggestions, but due to being a very small organization they're prioritizing obviously new features requests on a "who would pay for that?" basis.

You may be interested to learn that stellar UX is an important point for the snikket.org family of XMPP clients, despite not being there yet. There's an upcoming UX study if you'd like to take part: https://snikket.org/blog/simply-secure-collaboration/

I definitively like that they care