As texting
turns 20, could this popular app that allows phone users to chat for free take
the place of SMS?
Guardian, Charles Arthur, Tuesday 4 December 2012
 |
| WhatsApp … RU still using SMS? LOL! Photograph: Getty Images/ OJO Images |
You've
heard of texting, right? Billions of people use text messages, which have just turned 20. And you've heard of BBM (BlackBerry Messenger), the free system for
users of BlackBerry phones where, unlike texts, sending or receiving messages
costs nothing because it's done as data that you have already paid for in your
contact.
OK. But
have you heard of WhatsApp? If you're under 25, the answer is almost certainly
yes. It is a cross-platform mobile messaging app that allows you to exchange
messages without having to pay for SMS, and has an estimated 250 million users
worldwide. That's more than four times as many as BBM, and it has the mobile
operators increasingly worried, because it works like BBM – over data – but on
any phone that can run the app, including phones running Android, Windows
Phone, Nokia's Symbian and S40, BlackBerry OS and Apple's iOS. To communicate
with someone, you both have to have WhatsApp installed. (It will recognise your
contacts who do have it from their phone number.) That's a potential market of
many hundreds of millions of users, and although the company hasn't released
any formal numbers, it's safe to say that it's already really big, and likely
to become even more so.
WhatsApp
was started in 2009 by two ex-Yahoo staff, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, and
presently handles more than 10bn messages per day. And it's also one of the
most popular paid-for apps on any platform. Why a paid app (you have to buy it
on the iPhone; it's free for the first year on other platforms) rather than
totally free? Koum and Acton recently posted on the company blog to explain:
"These days companies know literally everything about you, your friends,
your interests, and they use it all to sell ads," they wrote.
"We
wanted to make something that wasn't just another ad clearing-house. We wanted
to spend our time building a service people wanted to use because it worked and
saved them money and made their lives better in a small way. We knew that we
could charge people directly if we could do all those things. We knew we could
do what most people aim to do every day: avoid ads."
Text
messaging may still be pulling in the money from pay-as-you-go users, but these
days they can get data bundles that let them send endless numbers of WhatsApp
messages, and never touch the gold-plated text message (whose per-message cost,
especially on PAYG, is miles out of kilter with what it costs to deliver or
send).
Tero
Kuittenen, of the Finnish consultancy Alekstra, says: "I believe we are
facing a period of accelerating erosion of SMS volumes – this is not going to
be a linear process." WhatsApp, he says, has grown tenfold in a year:
"Even though WhatsApp is such a fresh phenomenon, it has already played a
major role in pushing Spain's SMS volume into 25% annual decline."
So if you
haven't heard of WhatsApp, you might soon do. And if you have, when's the last
time you sent a text?
Related Article:
 |
Facebook is
updating its Messenger
app for Android mobile phones allowing
people send
messages via their data
plan. Photograph: Manu Fernandez/AP
|
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