Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

If you want to make a better WhatsApp, all you have to do is ... build a better app. The traditional obstacles are largely gone in the mobile world:

• You can access the same social graph just by requesting the contacts permission on your mobile phone: it's not like Facebook where the social network is locked away.

• You don't have to go through some slow moving standards process which takes years to get the features into the most widely used clients like you would if trying to improve XMPP.

• There's no cost to the user having multiple messaging apps installed thanks to Google/Apple's push networks: it's not like Windows/MacOS/Linux where having an app running in the background uses resources and requires permanent on-screen reminders of the resource wastage. So it's easy to get the user to set up your app.

• Notifications will appear in the same place the user is looking for them no matter what.

• You can (on Android) register for the right intents and whenever a friends phone number is invoked, your app will be offered as an option, so there's no lockin there either.

These things together mean the traditional reasons for pursuing federated networks for chat (the avoidance of lockin) are largely irrelevant.

Sure, I have messenger and hangouts and telegram as well, but WhatsApp is like a primary mode of communication.

WhatsApp on the other hand, is more trusted than Email - When some friend sends me an email, he asks me via WhatsApp if I revived it.

Group Chats, especially with younger folks, are numerous and used for anything, even though the technology is obviously lacking, when compared to other platforms.

But most people either don't care, or perceive these benefits as less important compared to the network effect that WhatsApp has - "I don't want to switch between [random messaging app] and WhatsApp, why don't you just accept what everyone uses".

It's practically the same as with Facebook in the US, and just as bad.

Something secure, flexible, workable, and open needs to replace it.

Re sharing contacts by replacing User@Domain with numbers:

Yes, this solves some of it because everyone agreed to use phone numbers, but phone numbers are a thing of the past and you don't always want to share your phone number just for messaging.

Re notification overhead:

If you have a system-wide notification display system, then of course the resources it requires are limited but you still have to have it running in the background in some form. Granted, it's probably easier to optimize it with everyone using the same notification system. This is just consolidation of a popular feature into system-provided functionality.

Re lockin:

But lockin still exists because you are the whim of centrally managed for-profit messaging backends, operated by entities whose intentions may not necessarily align with yours.

I'm not aware of cross-app synchronization of messages and even less so a common message format (feature) set supported by all that provides a rich experience.

I don't disagree with the cited shortcomings of XMPP, though you can always find a flaw in something which wasn't explicitly designed for the current use case, so ignoring that, the basic premise of XMPP is still sound and needed. Implementation details are something else, and honestly I don't agree that replacing XML with JSON (as in some of the proposals) gains anything in terms of efficiency, which it probably wasn't intended to anyway.

My impression is that building a messaging system is simple enough that many variants pop pup, but almost all of them get interoperability, synchronization, mobility, and security wrong. It's unsurprising because the simplicity attracts implementers of all domain experience levels.