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Whatsapp Will Become Free, Companies Can Pay To Reach Users (nytimes.com)
speedplane writes: The popular messaging service Whatsapp will soon become free (they previously charged $0.99 per year after the first). The troubling news is that to compensate for the lost revenue, companies will now be able to pay to contact users directly. "[Whatsapp founder] Mr. Koum said that his team was still experimenting with how such services could work, and that many companies were already using the messaging service, particularly in developing countries, to connect with mobile-savvy customers." If this smells like advertising, Whatsapp vehemently disagrees. A portion of their statement reads: "...people might wonder how we plan to keep WhatsApp running without subscription fees and if today's announcement means we're introducing third-party ads. The answer is no."
Advertising is what you encounter as a byproduct of doing other things.
Companies "reaching out to you" to send you messages directly has another name already - spam.
BTW this practice is supposed to be against Apple's app terms of service, and they do block some apps based on this - but I've seen some apps (recently Regal Cinemas) sending blatant promotional advertising over push. Really annoying and the quickest way an app can find itself in the rubbish bin.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you're going to suggest an app, Signal is the one. For one, it's open source. Second, it's backed by the EFF and a number of luminaries not the least of whom is Edward Snowden.
https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/...
I have no clue why, but I never spent money on Whatsapp, despite having been using it for several years. Every year there's a message saying that my subscription has been extended until February of next year. It beats as to why that happens.
Naturally, because Signal is the successor of TextSecure. They have merged functionalities of TextSecure and RedPhone into one, and that's Signal, to make it consistent with their iOS offering.
1) SMS are still not free in lot's of the world, and obscenely expensive in comparison to the data fees.
2) e-mail is SOooo 90's, lot's of people not even check it any more.
3) Default messaging apps (Google’s and Apple's ) are still not interoperable, some people never generate / are aware of generating an ID for those.
4) Facebook is not universal, not all facebook users use facebook on the phone, and there is people actively avoiding it for multiple reasons.
5) Whatsapp is free , just works TM and filled the niche first.
Why the hell are people using a "messaging app"? Don't most peoples' phones have messaging built in? Mine certainly does.
WhatsApp started offering free messaging at a time when most mobile companies around the world would still charge for each and every SMS sent (and received). They were in the right place at the right time in the early days of the smartphone, and where able to get a critical mass of users to the point that in many countries they ARE the default text messaging platform.
Keep in mind that some carriers would still charge for international text messages, even if they would be free within your own country -- WhatsApp never charged for those either.
In the US free text messages is/was much more common and they never captured a huge portion of the messaging market there, but on a global scale they currently have about a billion active users a month, which is not that far behind the marketshare of Facebook itself.