You can exchange all sorts of rich media - from full-resolution photos and video clips to documents, audio recordings, stickers, and animated GIFs. However, WhatsApp goes well beyond simple one-on-one chats. While this design means you need a mobile phone number to use WhatsApp, that’s kind of the point - and one of the likely reasons the platform has become so successful. The extent of your user profile is a name, photo, and brief 140-character “about” status. Further, there’s nothing to log into beyond confirming your mobile number the first time you set up WhatsApp on a new device. You don’t need to worry about knowing nicknames or usernames to communicate with your friends you only need a phone number. Like SMS/MMS and Apple’s iMessage, there are no accounts to set up, and communications are based entirely on phone numbers. Much of the magic of WhatsApp is in its elegant simplicity. While it’s still tied to mobile phones, it works equally well on both the iPhone and Android platforms, and there are Mac and Windows apps and even a web client that works in any modern browser. Nevertheless, while Apple created a solution for its own club of iPhone, iPad, and Mac users, and Google floundered about, WhatsApp created a platform-agnostic solution that just worked. Still, its attempts felt rudderless and never gained much traction, at least not until it more recently embraced the RCS messaging standard. Apple successfully did something similar in 2011 with its popular iMessage platform, and Google took several stabs at it with a variety of messaging apps. WhatsApp wasn’t the only app to try to address these limitations. Its younger brother, MMS, allows for the exchange of small bits of media, which amount to low-resolution photos and sound bites, but it’s effectively useless for exchanging videos and still lacks things like read receipts and status indicators. SMS was, and continues to be, stuck in the dark ages of technology, with 160-character limits and no support for anything other than pure text.
However, the point of WhatsApp was to replace SMS (and the lightly media-capable MMS) with a new platform that could overcome the limitations inherent in the archaic carrier-based messaging services. So, what exactly is WhatsApp? At its most basic level, it’s simply a chat app for exchanging messages with your friends, not unlike the SMS text messaging that’s built into nearly every mobile phone. What is WhatsApp? Joe Maring / DigitalTrends Since its 2014 acquisition by Facebook (now Meta), WhatsApp has reached a point where it’s now become the de facto standard for cross-platform messaging worldwide, with over 5 billion installs from the Google Play Store and 2 billion active monthly users. WhatsApp is copying two of Zoom’s best video-calling features Sunbird looks like the iMessage for Android app you’ve been waiting for WhatsApp finally lets you edit sent messages.
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