The messaging part isn't the problem.

The value in Skype, WhatsApp, etc. is the vast amount of work and codebase that goes into punching holes in routers/gateways/NATs to make the internet actually work like it was originally designed.

WhatsApp is not p2p, they maintain a constant server connection which is not a problem for routers/gateways/NATs because its initiated from the client side.

Proprietary messaging apps have a huge advantage in cutting down spam. Solve that and your open standard might just take off.

That's just security through obscurity. Seems to work for iMessage though, I've heard it's obfuscation is something incredible.

Spam prevention is not strictly a security problem, or if you choose to frame it that way it is entirely unlike most other system security challenges. Almost all spam prevention systems have some sort of secret sauce involved, otherwise spammers could train their own systems against it to discover what works. In other words, this is why most open-source security products are extremely competitive with (if not outright better than) their closed-source counterparts, but open-source spam prevention systems (with no disrespect to the people who work hard on them, because as I said, it's a hard problem) suck.

Security through obscurity is not an invalid strategy. If the capabilities of your adversary are low (e.g., bottomfeeding spammers) and the obscurity changes often (e.g., churn in API) it can work just fine.

Trillian! Seriously...ok, I get that these apps like WhatsApp, Viper got tons of users, but please don't give me no BS about them innovating. Trillian solved that problem a long long long long time ago.

I used to really like Trillian, iirc even payed for it once upon a time, but haven't used it in forever... most of my family and a lot of my friends are all on FB, so I check there once in a while.. anyone else will SMS/text me.

If anything, I think I've used google hangouts than most of the other IM platforms lately.

XMPP was designed for desktops with persistent internet connections, it has issues with a non-modified implementation on mobile.

Also XMPP is non-performant and verbose - these things matter as far a protocols go.

More importantly, XMPP has problems delivering the text-message-like experience. It's more of a live-chat protocol. If you want to receive messages when you're offline, things rapidly become a mess.

They shouldn't, though, because pretty much every XMPP server I've seen has user-offline message storage for later delivery eg [1], [2], and the "best practices" have been documented for years, e.g. [3].

Unless you actually mean "receive messages [to your device] when you're offline" and how the hell would that work?

[1] https://prosody.im/doc/modules/mod_offline [2] http://www.process-one.net/docs/ejabberd/guide_en.html#htoc4... [3] http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0160.html

fortunately there is improvement in sight: XEP-313 Message Archive Management [0] allows a client to fetch the backlog from its server, at the (privacy) cost of having all your messages stored on the server.

[0] http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html

WhatsApp is actually built on XMPP, I believe. I'm not sure how much it's modified it though.

Whatsapp actually uses a modified XMPP server