
WhatsApp's Co-Founder on How the App Became a Phenomenon - ghosh
http://www.wired.com/2015/10/whatsapps-co-founder-on-how-the-iconoclastic-app-got-huge/
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eecks
The reason I used WhatsApp early on was because it was more lightweight than
similar apps like Viber which had more features at the time but felt slower

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RyanZAG
Really good point - WhatsApp probably did well because it had fewer features,
and what features it did have were well polished and understandable.

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knight17
For me it was the network--everyone in my phone contacts was already available
to text. Skype hasn't transformed to the mobile world yet: I have to add
people manually even now. If WhatsApp introduces video calling and release a
serous desktop/web application I am sure it will rival all Skype-like
applications.

However, all is not perfect--the voice calling sometimes work, and most often
it doesn't. Purely on objective terms applications like Telegram work better
for texting and groups, but the network effect will keep WhatsApp floating.
Hope they will improve it soon.

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vezycash
Skype is maddening for me. I love Skype and that's why it hurts that they are
going to lose to WhatsApp at this pace. I use Windows phone so here's my
experience with both 1\. Notifications - Skype doesn't notify me if I get a
call or message when I was offline. WhatsApp does immediately

2\. Call connection speed - with WhatsApp, it's instantaneous for me. Skype
takes forever especially if the recipient is running Skype on mobile 3\. In a
poor imitation of WhatsApp, Skype now groups my phone contacts with my Skype
contact. Obvious, can't call them without Skype credit so it just wastes my
time unnecessarily 4\. WhatsApp is much lighter. It seems they are trying to
remedy this in Windows 10 mobile by decoupling the messaging part from the
calling part 5\. Notification count. Even on desktop, the notification count
is always 1. Even if I get 100 messages, it'll show 1.

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yitchelle
"Sure, the app was simple. But it met a real need." \- this sums it up. Nail
this and bam!

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anandsriniv
This article fails to answer questions about initial traction. I doubt
wireless carriers entertained WhatsApp when it was just a few thousand users
strong.

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dingaling
The question I have, as do most of my colleagues, is that if you have a data
connection why not just send an email? Rather than installing yet another app
and having to encourage people to adopt it.

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DominikR
Try building an email client that supports presence
(online/offline/busy/custom state), subscriptions, group chat with different
admin levels (owner, admin, member ...), message receipt and read
notifications, chat state notifications (composing, active, inactive ..), VoIP
including video chat (XMPP Jingle), public chat rooms, buddy lists, and many
other features that I didn't list.

Surely someone can model it on top of email too, but the effort would be
enormous and it would be proprietary.

XMPP on the other hand is a standardized protocol that supports all of this
with great library support on many platforms and that's why most chat clients
today use this protocol.

