this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
270 points (95.9% liked)
Technology
59446 readers
3657 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Also, at the time, WhatsApp was pretty much the only option. Nowadays, there are a lot of other options.
A part of it was that they put in the effort to support featurephones. People with smartphones always had other options.
It was the other way around, the feature phones were funny at the time so not supporting them would have made no sense. And iPhones and Androids had just been launched at the time so there weren't actually lots of options for them.
WhatsApp was available for Blackberry, Symbian, and Nokia Series 40, and I've seen device support cited as an important part of its early success. It actually looks like Skype, AIM, and ICQ had pretty good support for various devices in the early 2010s too so I'm not sure that claim holds up.