151–160 of 185 posts
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Living in Asia I use nothing but LINE unless dealing with property agents.
Asia is a continent; the biggest, and probably most diverse, continent in the world. Hong Kong was within Asia last time I checked, therefore your assertion that nobody in Asia uses WhatsApp is incorrect.
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WhatsApp's UI is a complete mess. Trying to explain it to my mum has been near-impossible. Starting a new conversation is done with an unlabeled FAB on the main-screen. She had no idea that that was even a button. Then there's four tabs across the top. One for taking pictures, because the Camera-App and the camera-shortcut in the conversation view apparently weren't enough, one for actual chats, one for setting your…
All of those things are pretty minor and employ fairly standard design patterns. I think you're exaggerating a bit here. The app is quite streamlined, especially compared to other apps like Facebook Messenger or Skype. I think if you were to remove any of the main features at this point, people would complain and jump ship to another app.
In India, Whatsapp is HUGE. I would go as far as to say if it were to go down for a day, we will see a dip in the per-day GDP. It is not that so much business is conducted on it, but also it is the dominant social messaging glue. Whatsapp probably has about 220 million users in India[1] and also because of dwindling mobile data prices, it also has now become the alternate voice channel [2]. Also I read that 90% of al…
>so much business is conducted on it WhapsApp could probably monetize there by tacking on a payments system, possible a bit paypal like. Could make money and not annoy existing users much beyond an extra button they don't use.
WhatsApp's success here in Brazil can be attributed to very few reasons: 1) Worked in every single smartphone (I started using it on a very resource constrained 2010's Nokia running s60) 2) SMS was and still is very expensive here. 3) Zero friction to use: it uses your phone number as your ID and your catalog list as its own. It was a killer combination, almost everybody here in Brazil uses it, no matter how young or…
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I'm a philistine, can someone explain how they paid their engineers when they lost SO much money?
WhatsApp was a very lean shop (and, btw, mostly (all?) FreeBSD). At acquisition, IIRC, they had about 40 employees total (or maybe it was 40 engineers).
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We hear this rant on every chat-related thread. WhatsApp brought the amazing innovation of using your phone number for "login" (and later on - your native contacts as its contacts list). This enabled zero-BS onboarding, and that's why they have so many users. Thanks WA for helping humanity deprecate that horrible XMPP. I don't miss it.
Funnily enough, the WhatsApp protocol started as XMPP and is now a heavily customized binary version of it I believe.
WhatsApp's success here in Brazil can be attributed to very few reasons: 1) Worked in every single smartphone (I started using it on a very resource constrained 2010's Nokia running s60) 2) SMS was and still is very expensive here. 3) Zero friction to use: it uses your phone number as your ID and your catalog list as its own. It was a killer combination, almost everybody here in Brazil uses it, no matter how young or…
Yep. But its very odd that so many iPhone users "facetime" and almost no one does the video chat thing on Whatsapp. Any idea why that is?
> all of its attention has gone into making the app as simple as possible to get started with And they succeeded. I've been using it for years and the only new feature I remember is end to end encryption, despite they probably added new features. I don't care about status and stories, if they're still there they managed not to make them in the way of people that only want a SMS alternative. This is great design. My o…
The other significant feature added was voice chats. The fact that it's easy to forget or not notice is a strong indicator of how much humanity has adopted text chatting as the primary mode of remote communication.
Here in India, the term 'whatsapp' has creeped its way into regular hinglish (mix of hindi and english) that most working professionals speak in. All schools, colleges, offices and even parents use WhatsApp groups to communicate. It has simply been embraced as the default place to communicate. Even drivers and servants on my contact list put up WhatsApp stories and send broadcasts; the intuitiveness of its adoption truly amazes me!
I'm kinda surprised to read that WhatsApp hasn't really caught on in the US—in the sense that not everyone you know uses it (on the contrary, very few do). Here in India, the term 'whatsapp' has creeped its way into regular hinglish (mix of hindi and english) that most working professionals speak in. All schools, colleges, offices and even parents use WhatsApp groups to communicate. It has simply been embraced as the…