The history of chat networks over the last quarter century is that they come and go and there is no long term loyalty to any of them. ICQ, AOL, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, Facebook Messenger, Google's many messengers, etc. are long forgotten and some of those used to be dominant and their disappearance seemed unimaginable. Mostly this is due to corporate stupidity and big corporations getting greedy about "owning" their user base and then throwing away the baby with the bathwater.
It seems Meta (a repeat offended with this) is yet again making that mistake with whatsapp. Prediction: they'll run it into the ground just like they ran Facebook Messenger into the ground. And Facebook itself of course.
Whatsapp only showed up because of extortion prices for SMS messages. It did the same thing for a fraction of the cost (1$/year initially). Easy sell, so it grew to many users. But who uses SMS at this point? I get a few once in a while. Mostly stupid 2FA codes. The core premise for Whatsapp has long disappeared.
Whatsapp is probably going to implode as Meta starts pushing through unpopular things like advertising and continues to be in the spotlight for routinely doing dodgy things with respect to privacy, surveillance, etc. They are just not a great brand when it comes to that and they are losing a lot of trust over time.
Mostly people use whatsapp because other people use whatsapp. Not because it's particularly good. IMHO it actually always was a bit meh compared to other things. But world+dog seems to like sending me messages with it so I'm on it.
For the same reason I've had Signal on my phone for a few years now and more and more messages are coming in via that. Neither are optional at this point. I expect Signal will eat a lot of the Whatsapp traffic soon.
And if not Signal than something else. Whatsapp was famously built with only a small team. That's 16 years ago. These days building something like that from scratch could be done in a fraction of the time with minimal effort. You could vibe code an MVP in an afternoon and it wouldn't be horrible. This stuff is a pure commodity at this point. We don't need trillion dollar big tech companies doing this for us.
It seems Meta (a repeat offended with this) is yet again making that mistake with whatsapp. Prediction: they'll run it into the ground just like they ran Facebook Messenger into the ground. And Facebook itself of course.
Whatsapp only showed up because of extortion prices for SMS messages. It did the same thing for a fraction of the cost (1$/year initially). Easy sell, so it grew to many users. But who uses SMS at this point? I get a few once in a while. Mostly stupid 2FA codes. The core premise for Whatsapp has long disappeared.
Whatsapp is probably going to implode as Meta starts pushing through unpopular things like advertising and continues to be in the spotlight for routinely doing dodgy things with respect to privacy, surveillance, etc. They are just not a great brand when it comes to that and they are losing a lot of trust over time.
Mostly people use whatsapp because other people use whatsapp. Not because it's particularly good. IMHO it actually always was a bit meh compared to other things. But world+dog seems to like sending me messages with it so I'm on it.
For the same reason I've had Signal on my phone for a few years now and more and more messages are coming in via that. Neither are optional at this point. I expect Signal will eat a lot of the Whatsapp traffic soon.
And if not Signal than something else. Whatsapp was famously built with only a small team. That's 16 years ago. These days building something like that from scratch could be done in a fraction of the time with minimal effort. You could vibe code an MVP in an afternoon and it wouldn't be horrible. This stuff is a pure commodity at this point. We don't need trillion dollar big tech companies doing this for us.