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They never worked properly on phones, including images/video and history. Same for SMS chats on top of being hideously expensive because the phone companies thought it was still the 1960s.

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iforgotpassword a day ago | parent [-]

Yes, that's why they should have made them work properly.

Simply put the main problem was that those old IMs required a persistent connection to the server when you "just" had to add a new protocol that can do session resumption/polling. Then make a pretty mobile UI and make it possible to find other users by phone number - imo this was the number one reason why WhatsApp and iMessage won. It's an app on your phone, so it uses your phone number, not another artificial number or name or mail address - it's something the most tech illiterate gets. Because then it's just "SMS but with groups and photos". But you could have allowed to merge it with your existing account from desktop times, so all the young hip people would've kept all their contacts.

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bentcorner a day ago | parent [-]

IIRC one of the reasons WhatsApp has done so well is that they basically supported every platform under the sun, which was a technical challenge back in the day.

These days the field is much narrower but 10+ years ago finding an app that supported everyone's device was a challenge.

	▲	jlokier a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> one of the reasons WhatsApp has done so well is that they basically supported every platform under the sun Not really. There's still no iPad version. My friend installed Whatsapp from the App Store for their iPad, to find it didn't behave quite as expected, and didn't match their phone and desktop experience. That turned out to be because it was an app from some random third party with its own features. It used Whatsapp in the name, and had a similar logo. When my friend realised they were unexpectedly using a third party app, from a provider they'd never heard of, they were worried they'd accidentally given away access to their account full of sensitive messages to someone they didn't trust. I was surprised my cautious friend would install the wrong app by mistake, as the Apple app store is normally good for well known services. While scrolling through Whatsapp apps, it took me a while to realise the top search result, which my friend had installed, wasn't actually from Whatsapp (but looked similar). Even though the logo was a little different, I assumed that was just a quirk. It's just so unexpected to find that what you get on iPad isn't the real thing, when searching for Whatsapp gets you the real thing if you're looking from an iPad or Mac.
	▲	foobarian 15 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think WhatsApp's magic sauce was the effortless onboarding. No need for accounts, passwords, nagging for 2fa, your email, your socials, just get the app and go, by delegating all that to the phone (and phone number as the user id).