this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2021
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Neat metaphor and the citations are much appreciated.
I feel like a bit of nuance is lost in this explanation of its initial rise:
It seems like there was something rather unique about being able to make free calls, perhaps especially in (Eastern?) Europe and around the less developed world, with encryption as a bonus. Perhaps other options in the list you provided were viable and marketing played an important role, but I think something about WA made it a killer app.
I’m curious what others have to say.
I think the killer feature for most people was simply that anyone whose number you had in your phone's address book would, without any further configuration, become available as a WhatsApp contact if they, too, had installed the app. That made it usable even by people so unfamiliar with technology that the concept of creating an account was foreign to them. No password, no username, just your phone's address book and the app, that's it. Open IM technologies at the time like XMPP didn't have this (at least to my knowledge), and even today, while Matrix has this feature via identity servers, it takes manual effort to set it up (as it should be, though it could be streamlined somewhat in Element AFAICT).
FWIW, this is also a feature in Signal, another closed platform I covered.