This. This is the answer I have always looked for.
> "But, but, how is WhatsApp any different than iMessage / Facebook Messenger / Hangouts?"
I have made this exclamation multiple times, and my friends in India and Singapore and other parts of Asia just turned up their palms with a "I dunno, everyone uses it and told me to get it."
I refused to use it since I like to use as few messaging platforms as possible (just Google Hangouts right now since it has most of my contacts, voice and video) despite my friends pestering me.
J2ME is the most reasonable explanation. I see why it made Whatsapp itself popular. But still? Almost everyone I know who's using it actually uses it on an Android/iOS smart device. Who is this "everyone" of theirs using it on feature phones? I doubt their friends circle intersects that heavily with rural villagers living on $10/day.
And also, is this really a viable long-term play for Facebook? How does this contribute towards the rest of their product plays?
In Holland, WhatsApp dominates, and it's not a $10/day country.
It dominates because SMS rates were too expensive here. Even when Mom & Dad would buy you an iPhone, kids were choosing Blackberries (!) as their primary phone because of internet messaging.
WhatsApp was seen as something worked with non BB devices (iPhones, Androids). It pretty much murdered the cell phone providers who were giving away cheap data rates and betting on income from increased SMS usages. Whoops.
When iMessage and Hangouts came along it was really too late. The process flow for most users who want to send a text is: go to WhatsApp first, if the user isn't there or doesn't respond, send an SMS and be frustrated with them.
Anyone could have beat WhatsApp in NL, but didn't. If the telcos would have given out unlimited SMS messages, it probably wouldn't exist. If BlackBerry would have released iOS/Andriod versions, they probably would have been the standard in Holland. If Apple would have released iMessage earlier, instead of (presumably) not wanting to piss off the carriers, it would have stood a chance. ... certainly if they also released apps for other platforms.
Yes and I would also add that using the phone number / imei as account identifier helped them a lot to convince everybody and their mother to use the service. Personally I'm not a friend of WhatsApp, but the reason even older, far from tech-savvy people are using it is the ease of access - you don't need anyones username or email - just install the app and your existing contacts show up. I've seen people who couldn't remember their own email using the app within seconds on a feature phone. Try that with Facebook.
I'm from Portugal and I saw in the comments that many people use it here. In my experience I never used it. I know maybe two people that use it. But clearly my view must be totally off the reality because of the stuff I read here and in the article comments section.
I pay 5€ a month and have unlimited free SMS's for almost everybody in my network. And that's it. That's what I use.
I could see the problem of cross device messaging, but SMS are for that.
To use Whatapp I'd need internet and pay for that in my mobile plan. I don't want that.
Although I have free unlimited sms for people I contact to (and use it a lot) there's still a little problem, that normally it is only for people in the same mobile network as me. But not really a huge problem because those people are very few and I don't mind spending the money in my phone that I wouldn't use for anything else.
Oh the sms and calls for people in my network are all free, so I have always money not being used for anything in the phone card.
I'm from Spain, and curiously, what you say about Holland applies to Spain word by word (well, maybe with the exception of iMessage having a chance - iPhones never got to be very popular here).
It would be interesting if some made a study about price of SMSs in each European countries 4 or 5 years ago vs. WhatsApp adoption. Maybe the huge differences in market shares would be clarified.
This doesn't explain the success WhatsApp had in Europe.
Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland, etc. WhatsApp dominates all of these markets.
I think a reason for this is that in Europe, we're not used to unlimited text plans. Unlike the US, we don't have to pay to receive text messages, only to send them, so there is little incentive to get an "unlimited plan" anyways. But ultimately, you still end up paying 20 cents or so for a text message, whereas with WhatsApp you pay at max 1 buck per year.
Secondly, for a long time, WhatsApp's user experience was simply much better than what Facebook had to offer with their Facebook messenger app. There simply was no alternative to WhatsApp for quite some time.
I actually resisted hopping on the WhatsApp train for a long time, but when virtually everyone of your friends uses it, you will join up sooner or later.
Unlimited texts come with every mobile plan which cost more than 20€,
even when it's not unlimited the rates are really cheap and you don't pay for received texts ever.
MMS were never part of the data plan either, when you get unlimited SMS it always comes with free MMS.
afaik, using whatsapp require you to have a data plan, and in France you'll almost always get unlimited texts before data plans
almost all of France's carrier offer ulimited SMS as default. then comes MMS then voice.
I'd venture and propose that one of the biggest reason WhatsApp (and before that BB and why the blackberry platform had an appeal to mass consumers) worked so well is for a simple reason yet none is going to easily admit willingly:
WhatsApp lets you see if the person you texted to has read your text or not in a non intrusive way.
Also not to forget, WhatsApp started when iMessage didn't exist and Facebook messenger either, it wasn't even giving a delivery confirmation. Only BBM did, only on blackberries.
And here comes WhatsApp who does the exact same thing only much simpler ("are you on whatsApp? yeah! give me your phone number, i'll add you" instead of BBM pushing their PIN system...) and it comes working for almost all platforms. when it launched, it sure worked on Blackberry and iphone.
"how is WhatsApp any different than iMessage / Facebook Messenger / Hangouts?"
That's not the right question to begin with.
The right question on this is: are those instant messenger users on WhatsApp worth much financially, will they ever produce financial returns, such that you justify $19 billion in any respect. I say no, the value of messenger bytes is nearly zero unless you can hold the users hostage and extract large sums from them (as AT&T and Verizon did on SMS). All user actions are not created equal in terms of the economic value they generate - one network of actions is not inherently as valuable as another; this premise will eventually burst the myth of Snapchat and WhatsApp being worth their current valuations.
How much are all those users worth? Not much if they don't actually generate cash, which is why webmail and traditional instant messaging is worthless financially.
WhatsApp was a threat to them, and that demonstrates just how financially dark Facebook's future is. Facebook will have to perpetually destroy its shareholder value buying up non-performing businesses to try to stall those upstarts from destroying Facebook's temporary ad platform. Facebook is likely to get Craigslist'd (replaced by an endless parade of dirt cheap social apps with no business prospects), because the real financial value of what it does is low.
The app itself is very useful to its users, but it's not financially worth much, no different than Gmail or Yahoo Mail (which both have hundreds of millions of users that send bazillions of messages per day).
Take away: the messages aren't worth much financially; the users aren't worth much financially. Five years from now, people are going to look back on all of this, and think it was crazy how much was being paid for "users" and "messages."
> I say no, the value of messenger bytes is nearly zero unless you can hold the users hostage and extract large sums from them (as AT&T and Verizon did on SMS).
Exactly. Look at all the messenger platforms of yesteryear - ICQ, MSN, AIM, Y!M. Did any of them make any money aside from some ad scratch money to keep the lights on?
I agree. You have people out there like Marc Andreessen comparing SnapChat to Tencent and saying it's potentially worth $100B or so. These people are off their goddamn meds. They are pure vulture capitalists, and poor mom and dad out in Nebraska are going to get stuck carrying this stinking mess when their 401k inevitably implodes.
You want to see how much eyeballs are worth, look at reddit. They are pretty much a corporate charity, with their reddit gold scam going on.
When people get accustomed to not paying for things, they don't pay for things. I'm not going to pay for a newspaper when I can read it all online. And yet, I'll happily go to dinner one night a week and spend more than it costs for an entire year's subscription to the local newspaper.
WhatsApp is $1 a year. That's great if you're running with a few hundred employees and have such a massive user base. That's doing more than okay, in my book. But $19B? You're not getting that back. Certainly not in any timeframe that matters. Because what's hot today will not be what's hot 5 years from now. We all know that. It's how the tech industry works.
WhatsApp just works and it works really well - you don't have to sign up, you don't have to add contacts. Isn't it obvious what a big deal that is? Also it is really reliable and fast. Often it seems even when my phone has only the slowest GPRS internet connection available to it, WhatsApp is still as good or better than texts in terms of speed and reliability. Facebook messenger probably wouldn't even connect in that situation in my experience. I'd be surprised if Hangouts wasn't the same
In Singapore, where there are not many people using J2ME phones with a 3G data plan, this is why:
Facebook - not everyone has a Facebook account (think parents, young kids), you're not Facebook friends with everyone you know, and you don't _want_ to be Facebook friends with everyone you need to contact. I think they have been trying to change this on Facebook Messenger, but still, you need a Facebook account, and that's a line that many people refuse to cross on principle.
Hangouts - not everyone has Google account, because they use another email provider (Hotmail, Yahoo, ISP), and don't want to get "a Gmail account" just to use it. Granted, this might work great for Android users, but in practice, nobody uses this here (except maybe for multi-party video conferencing). Practically don't see iPhone users on Hangouts either; it is very much associated with Android (and hiding in the background, many people don't even know they're logged in because they don't use it, and nobody uses it to contact them).
iMessage - doesn't work on Android. Yes, there are many iPhones in the world, but you are incredibly selective about who you need to contact if they all have iMessage. But granted, this works quite transparently between iPhones.
Now, iMessage (and Viber) is probably the closest to the 0-step-to-add-contact way of WhatsApp. Because there's no process to do that, there's no contact-request 'approval' required from the other side, there's no friction. You add someone to your phone book, they show up in WhatsApp, you send a message or add them to a group. That's it.
It is a lot easier to teach folks to use WhatsApp just because of this. It's about as complicated to use as your platform's built-in SMS client. It is a huge contrast with the 101 features of WeChat, and to a lesser extent, LINE. WeChat is _huge_ with the PRC community here, but that's about it. Everyone else is on WhatsApp.
Viber is probably the next in line, but due to WhatsApp's network effects, it just didn't take off. Sure, it has internet voice calls, but it's known for being a little flakey on the call quality, and by default its notifications can be a bit annoying. WhatsApp never pops things up unless someone sent you a message.
Ah. Blackberry. I forgot that is included in the J2ME target devices. That explains nearly everything, although any of my friends who had those blackberries have transitioned since, and now people are just (well played WhatsApp) locked into the service.
I only have my parents and my wife on WhatsApp but none of them have or need a Google account or a Facebook account (which my dad refuses to use) and nor do they need to be iPhone users.
WhatsApp works quickly, cleanly and seamlessly across mobile platforms, and that's all it needs to do.
> "But, but, how is WhatsApp any different than iMessage / Facebook Messenger / Hangouts?"
I have made this exclamation multiple times, and my friends in India and Singapore and other parts of Asia just turned up their palms with a "I dunno, everyone uses it and told me to get it."
I refused to use it since I like to use as few messaging platforms as possible (just Google Hangouts right now since it has most of my contacts, voice and video) despite my friends pestering me.
J2ME is the most reasonable explanation. I see why it made Whatsapp itself popular. But still? Almost everyone I know who's using it actually uses it on an Android/iOS smart device. Who is this "everyone" of theirs using it on feature phones? I doubt their friends circle intersects that heavily with rural villagers living on $10/day.
And also, is this really a viable long-term play for Facebook? How does this contribute towards the rest of their product plays?