Commercially, it totally did. Without Whatsapp we could not sell enough devices, but without enough volume Whatsapp was not interested to build an official app. Chicken, meet egg!
If it was literally make-or-break for the entire platform, especially in the markets it was targeting, I’m surprised Mozilla never volunteered to subsidize or build a WhatsApp port.
- have been friendly to 3rd party clients developers, like Loquim (https://loqui.im/). Once WA turned on e2e encryption, the situation for 3rd party clients changed from "difficult but fun" to "mostly impossible".
I wonder what markets WhatsApp is important to. In the UK quite a few people used it while briefly lived there, but in the US, Thailand, Vietnam, et.al. I didn't see anyone using or ever talking about it.
In the Netherlands WhatsApp is so ubiquitous that it always surprises me to hear other countries are not 100% WA. (Besides China, for obvious reasons it doesn't surprise me China has their own app.)
The only people I know who don't use WhatsApp are very privacy focused and therefor use Signal.
I'm seeing a lot of push towards Discord in the USA as well; it's a bit awkward in that kind of usage, but when basically everyone is already using Discord on PC it's not hard to convince people to use the phone app.
I find it curious a lot of friends are getting back to Skype, for personal use, across continents, and not CorporateSkype/OC. Is this a huge selection bias thing? Don't know. Several have also recently deleted GMail.