WhatsApp lets people find each other with phone numbers instead email addresses. This has a profound difference in real-world usability because it decreases friction.
Before WhatsApp, people texted each other using cell companies SMS.
Why did Person A (who already had an email address) send a SMS text to Person B (who also already had an email address) ?!? Because both people already had each others' phone number in their phone's address book. Recording each other's email address is less likely.
To wit, my mother has already memorized my brand new phone number that I've only had for a few years but she doesn't know my email address at all even though I've sent it and re-sent it to her multiple times. To normal people, the phone numbers are more sacred than email addresses. WhatsApp was a continuation of the conveniences of SMS -- without paying 10 cents per message to the mobile phone carriers.
Friction from cognitive overhead is a big deal in technology adoption.
On the same note, isn't phone numbers being more sensitive information than email nowadays, hence you might not want to share it.
Look if it is saved in the smartphone's address book, why does it matter if it is email or a phone number. I bet that people don't actually memorize even the phone numbers of people close to them these days.
>Why did Person A (who already had an email address) send a SMS text to Person B (who also already had an email address) to chat?!?
I think it is because we didn't have near universal internet access in smartphones for a long time. If Whatsapp (or something like that) was a little bit late to appear, and the tech crowd was actually a bit more smarter, things like Delta Chat had a much better chance to be in Whatsapps current place.
Because when people interact with each other in informal situations, it's the phone numbers that are shared. Not email addresses. Thus, email addresses are often not in the Contacts app at all.
Arguably primarily because they want to chat with them and not email them. The two have vastly different UX beyond just contact discovery.
Before WhatsApp there were ICQ (also number-based!), MSN, Skype... WhatsApp's main contribution over these was indeed using phone numbers and contacts access for automated contact discovery, but I don't think it makes sense at all to characterize it as a usability improvement on email.
Another case in point: iMessage supports email addresses as identifiers too. I don't even have my phone number on there because I consider it a strictly inferior identifier (it changes every time I move countries, I lose it if payments to my operator ever lapse, unlike a TLD I have no way of owning it independently from a phone plan etc.)
Chats in general (not WhatsApp specifically) have "better" usability than email for some people because:
+ chats skipp the extra keystrokes of email workflow such as "Compose new email" and then enter an extra "Subject:" line which makes normal people put useless things in there such as "a quick question..." and then put the real conversation in the email body. It's a bunch of extra friction for no reason when communicating informally between friends & family.
+ chat ids such as phone numbers are not given out as freely as email addresses which makes chats have less spam and clutter and more easily isolated to personal communications. Email inboxes are clogged up with a bunch of non-chat mails like shipment notifications from Amazon.
I actually prefer email comms and have told my family to send me emails instead of text chats because I'm always at my desk and can use my full keyboard to type out a reply -- but -- they ignore me and always just send text chats. Normal people have a mental model that's geared toward text chats.
E.g. I saw my aunt again 30 years after she last saw me and one of the first things she asked was "What's your phone #? I want to send you a photo when you were little." And because I received her text, I now have my aunt's phone # in my Contacts app. But I don't have her email address. She never gave it to me; and I never asked for it.
Exchanging phone #s is the natural thing to do between friends & family. On the other hand, exchanging emails is often more natural when interacting in business settings or dealing with people at arms length.
Definitely, but that's not WhatsApp's innovation.
i do the same as you as i dont carry a phone anymore (fucking with the police).
Does this solve all the other problems with encrypted email, which is not widely used for a reason?
Here's a discussion
https://www.latacora.com/blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypte...
I honestly don't care about what the people I communicate with do, as long as I have the capability to at least own my persistent identifier (i.e. my TLD).
Just having that capability exerts just the right type of pressure on large service providers to maintain a baseline quality of service, regardless of whether the majority actually makes use of it or not, just like phone number portability has done in that domain.
but that is the case with every messenger that stores messages on your behalf. telegram, whatsapp, signal... with those ALL people are not running their own servers.
whatsapp and signal store encrypted copies of the messages, and so does deltachat.
beyond that each client also stores a copy of each message locally. as does deltachat.
in difference to all others at least with deltachat i have a choice to use a different server that i trust. with whatsapp and signal i don't have that choice.
it doesn't solve all of them but a few at least. i don't believe using pgp itself is a problem. if it was deltachat could replace it with another better encryption.
metadata is a problem. that could be solved by removing messages from the email server and storing them elsewhere. (or storing them back on the server with the metadata removed). that doesn't prevent intermediate mail forwarders from keeping a copy though. i think that is the real problem. deltachat doesn't control the communication channel and can't prevent leaking. i don't know how matrix or jabber compare here. if they use intermediate servers to forward messages the problem would remain.
message content leaking is not a problem because messages won't ever be decrypted on the server.
long term secret leaking is a problem tied to the current implementation of pgp. deltachat could change that (and maybe it does?)
> Reliable instant messaging
If it's based on e-mail, it's just not. (if we assume generally close-to-realtime delivery and not being blocked by random recipients)
Hell, Jabber can still do this. I'm not convinced of the other modern alternatives that don't have half the functional capabilities that Jabber do.
The only "downside" of Jabber is that it's XML based, but really if you think about it, that's a strength. Anyone here could probably parse the protocol effortlessly. There's also lots of fully functional clients out today, and servers that scale like nobody's business.
I'm more ashamed we don't invest more into XMPP: Google Talk, Facebook Chat and WhatsApp were built around it. These are companies with insane to scale userbases, tried and tested.
Here's a 2008 article from Facebook on using their chat with a Jabber client:
Nope.
Another downside is the X. The protocol being extensible means that no two clients implement the same subset of extensions making it useless. I’ve been scolded in the past for using the "wrong" client, making my messages look weird for people using the "right" client. Just make a good protocol.
This reminds me on this nice comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19217818
that generic server backend that i am describing in my linked comment is something i am using here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42159045
Email is the completely wrong protocol choice for instant messaging. It's just a completely different use case. You wouldn't send a letter to the fire department if your house is on fire either.
When you use XMPP or Matrix you know your message will be delivered instantly. When you use email you don't. But that's only because we haven't defined an extension that tells the client whether the server can deliver messages instantly. It's not really that inherent to the system. Surely you've had at least one real-time conversation by email because both of you happened to be online at the same time and nothing went wrong necessitating a message delay.
In particular, Email has a lot of assumptions about acceptable delivery delays, bidirectional (non-)reachability etc. baked in that would be very hard to globally undo.
SMTP is optimized for the use case of email; XMPP is optimized for one-to-one instant messaging; Matrix is optimized for "Slack-like" chat.
I highly doubt that these three use cases are similar enough to warrant introducing an additional common protocol/layer.
Are there some compromises? Of course. But creating new accounts, or using new services isn't one of them. Email-speed instant messaging is good enough for me.
And to be honest, as much as I like Matrix, it has plenty of compromise of its own - including speed/reliability when using their own servers.