Neat metaphor and the citations are much appreciated.
I feel like a bit of nuance is lost in this explanation of its initial rise:
It originally persuaded people to consent to this by allowing them to send text to each other over the Internet, something that was already possible, and combining an easy-to-learn UI with successful marketing. It then expanded to include features such as voice and video calls.
It seems like there was something rather unique about being able to make free calls, perhaps especially in (Eastern?) Europe and around the less developed world, with encryption as a bonus. Perhaps other options in the list you provided were viable and marketing played an important role, but I think something about WA made it a killer app.
I think the killer feature for most people was simply that anyone whose number you had in your phone’s address book would, without any further configuration, become available as a WhatsApp contact if they, too, had installed the app. That made it usable even by people so unfamiliar with technology that the concept of creating an account was foreign to them. No password, no username, just your phone’s address book and the app, that’s it. Open IM technologies at the time like XMPP didn’t have this (at least to my knowledge), and even today, while Matrix has this feature via identity servers, it takes manual effort to set it up (as it should be, though it could be streamlined somewhat in Element AFAICT).
Author here; thanks for the feedback. I just updated that section to address this. Diff.
I can’t believe I forgot about free calls; my parents and extended family depended on that for international calls. VOIP services were already a thing, but I’m not sure how many of them were both gratis and better for user freedom than WA.
Neat metaphor and the citations are much appreciated.
I feel like a bit of nuance is lost in this explanation of its initial rise:
It seems like there was something rather unique about being able to make free calls, perhaps especially in (Eastern?) Europe and around the less developed world, with encryption as a bonus. Perhaps other options in the list you provided were viable and marketing played an important role, but I think something about WA made it a killer app.
I’m curious what others have to say.
I think the killer feature for most people was simply that anyone whose number you had in your phone’s address book would, without any further configuration, become available as a WhatsApp contact if they, too, had installed the app. That made it usable even by people so unfamiliar with technology that the concept of creating an account was foreign to them. No password, no username, just your phone’s address book and the app, that’s it. Open IM technologies at the time like XMPP didn’t have this (at least to my knowledge), and even today, while Matrix has this feature via identity servers, it takes manual effort to set it up (as it should be, though it could be streamlined somewhat in Element AFAICT).
FWIW, this is also a feature in Signal, another closed platform I covered.
This is what i remember as well. Free SMS and then free calls was the pitch.
Author here; thanks for the feedback. I just updated that section to address this. Diff.
I can’t believe I forgot about free calls; my parents and extended family depended on that for international calls. VOIP services were already a thing, but I’m not sure how many of them were both gratis and better for user freedom than WA.
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(F1rst P0st!)