WhatsApp bucks convention, quietly builds a messaging titan

A lot of people in this thread seem to be trying to pick apart Whatsapp's business model, but I can't seem to find anything to criticize.<p>1) Creating a new identity and communicating it to people is a chore. Whatsapp just uses your existing email and phone number.<p>2) Creating a new list of contacts is a chore. Whatsapp just uses your existing contact list of emails and phone numbers.<p>3) At least on iOS, signing in to a service and managing session timeouts is passé. With Whatsapp you install it, run it once, and the Push Notification API handles the persistent connection and receiving messages without ever having to launch the app again. Or without even making sure it's running.<p>4) iMessage and BBM do the same thing, but those are nonstarters in a multi platform world. Neither service is going to go multi platform any time soon if ever.<p>Whatsapp is the Dropbox of messaging. Everything else just looks outdated and clunky in comparison.<p>That said, I'm really disappointed in Google. Google is positioning GTalk as a competitive advantage for Android. There is no reason there shouldn't be official GTalk clients on every platform. GTalk on iOS would be more popular than all of Google's other iOS apps combined.

Good for them. 17 engineers, 3 support reps and 2 founders, organic viral growth based strictly on product merits - my kind of startup.<p>However.<p>Now taking bets which established IM company will sue them first and over which (trivial) patent. Perhaps after refusing their acquisition offer.

As a data point, I went on a tour of the AT&#38;T Global network operations center (in NJ) in mid October, and they showed us some stats -- one I recall is 2.3B texts on the AT&#38;T network in the past 24 hours. So WhatsApp is closing in on half of AT&#38;T's SMS volume.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/#!/savraj/status/126718943179190272" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/#!/savraj/status/126718943179190272</a>

I'm getting really tired of all these proprietary instant messaging solutions. It won't be long before people will realize they will at some point have to pay for usage of WhatsApp. When that happens, something else will gain traction, restarting the cycle again once more.<p>I hope Google just acquires WhatsApp already and opens up the platform. It's been years now, and about bloody time for something to appear that's the standard, open, cross-platform and free way of sending messages over the internet.

This is the perfect example for "picking pennies in front of a charging steamroller". IM is already chosen as infrastructure by platform makers (Apple, Facebook), given that they've integrated in into their offerings. This is the kind of startup that withers after the next platform update.<p>Do they have some secret sauce that enables them to offer way more value than a vanilla IM app ? That's their only escape route.

WhatsApp gives me a warm fuzzy feeling every time I use it, knowing that my messages are whizzing through an Erlang application running on FreeBSD.

What i really hate is that everyone tries to convince me to use that app. Why? What benefits does it have? Only the drawback that i have to transmit every phone number in my address book to them. I don't want them to have my phone number and yet half a dozen people i know transferred it to them without my knowledge.<p>In short: There is XMPP, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Facebook, Skype, etc. Why the hell another one? And one that will cost.. i really don't get it..<p>Next best thing to happen will be that some big advertising company (see myspace) will buy them.. hooray...

It's no different compared to other IM's. There are other players like Nimbuzz in this space from a long time and also for all platforms.<p>The only cool thing they did was getting your phone numbers and mapping those contacts to your address book.<p>This opens a whole new dimension.<p>IM is the next SMS 2.0. IM will be tightly integrated to our address books and the platform makers will all enter this space and Kill the others. Like the iMessage in iOS?<p>Today Platform is the king; content isn't.

&#62; And it’s used in 250 countries on 750 networks.<p>There aren't 250 countries in the world. Must be a typo?

While I prefer kik over WhatsApp because it's cleaner and free, I kinda like WhatsApp being paid and still growing much more than the free alternatives. This might be related to the ban kik had on Blackberry phones.

Is it bad that I've never heard of this app or seen it been used in the wild before? The iPhone app looks really ugly, and I can't see myself convincing my friends to start using it if they have to pay for the app when we could just be using iMessage, SMS, or Facebook Messenger. What's the draw here?

To those suggesting that messaging should be replaced by instant messengers: No thanks. WhatsApp, iMessage and this kind of solutions have one feature that they carry over from SMS that makes all the difference to me: they don't have the concept of presence.<p>I don't need to be "online" to receive messages, people don't know if I'm "online", "away", "offline", they just send me a message and they know I'll eventually get it. Exactly like email.<p>That is one great feature. How many times have you found yourself or your buddies "hacking" the status indicator because you don't want to give away your real status? I hate when people are always "away" or "busy":it makes the status indicator useless and I just came to ignore it, it is just that annoying thing that when it's gray it prevents me from messaging you.<p>If we just remove the status indicator, all that stress disappears. I don't want IM to replace SMS-like solutions.