You can scrap secure from this, the vast majority of users don't care or even know what that means.
If SMS was more secure I 100% would still expect whatsapp to win. Convenience and cost are the biggest drivers here.
Until you get sued or called in front of legislative bodies to testify about why your customer data was breached.
But maybe you're big enough at that point to ride it out.
On the other hand, it's very very hard to add in robust security after reaching critical mass.
"Here's all the data we have, officers. We don't have the keys. Good luck."
Consumers didn't follow this logic. At all. They went for the convenient and free option.
I'm so confused by this thread. It's like you guys are pasting the output of an ML model with only the input "secure" at me.
You talked about encryption on HN. What do you expect? Might as well have brought up gun control at a Republican rally.
(Not that you were anything but 100% right. The general public didn't care about encryption at all until the Snowden leaks.)
Back in 2009, though, this was a very different story. Even tech-savvy people didn't care.
And that's all it had to do; the telecoms weren't interested in making SMS cheap or secure, RIM didn't want BBM on anything but their devices, ICQ/AIM/MSN/etc were similarly unavailable.