Evolution of Whatsapp
It’s been eight years since Whatsapp was first launched in the year 2009. A lot of features have been added on the way, the recent one being the ability to post status in the form of stories; something which is being considered by many as a ripoff of Snapchat. While this latest feature might have been disliked by most users, there are a lot of other features that have added value to the product thereby resulting in it being one of the most popular instant messaging apps. In this post, we’ll go through the roadmap of Whatsapp from 2009 to now.
Following is how the product roadmap would have looked like for Whatsapp —
If we consider the buckets of priority, we can deduce the following -
Must have bucket —
Sending and receive instant messages from others.
Push notifications to alert users of new messages.
Sending media such as pictures and videos.
Sending and receiving messages in a group.
Sending voice messages to others.
Good to have bucket —
Status and profile pics.
Voice call feature.
Compression technology to support larger data transfer and reduce network load and costs.
End to end encryption to enhance data security.
Whatsapp Web.
Great to have bucket —
Privacy controls on status and profile pics.
Video call feature
Group Audio call
Group Video call
Breaking into the market — Brian Acton and Jan Koum, the co-founders of Whatsapp, started working on the app for the app store. The iOS version was launched first as their primary target was the US market at that time. Apple smartphones were a rage in the US, and hence the creators decided to create the app on the iOS platform. After a couple of months, they launched the app on blackberry world as well. Nokia had a big share of the smartphone market across the globe at that time, and hence it made sense to offer support to the Symbian operating system. This Symbian version was launched in mid of 2010. Google’s Android operating system was catching on with the users and smartphone makers, and hence Whatsapp quickly followed up with an Android version launch in Aug 2010.
Building on the feature list — After rendering the SMS or text service obsolete using its instant messaging feature, one of the initial feature that was added by Whatsapp was the ability to send photos. This meant users could now transfer media content as well instead of just the plain text messages. However, the ability to send GIF images was released only in late 2015. GIF images were very popular on the internet, and it would have made sense to add this feature a bit earlier. This is one of the features I felt should have been prioritized a bit higher in the roadmap or the product backlog.
In 2014, after the acquisition by Facebook, Whatsapp started working on voice calls. It was a great feature to add since users already used different apps for making calls over the internet using their smartphone. This was to compete with apps such as Viber, Skype, Line, etc.
If you look at it, Whatsapp seems to be late to add this feature since the other apps had already established themselves in this space. There were numerous apps that offered VoIP service. It would have made sense for Whatsapp to have prioritized and added this feature much before.
After launching the voice call feature, the next addition was video calls. It made sense to delay the launch of video calling until late 2016 as the majority of the users in Whatsapp’s dominant markets had slow internet connectivity and would have struggled to have a seamless video call.
Another interesting addition was Whatsapp web in Jan 2015. Some people believe it should have been released earlier. It would have made sense to release the web version before offering support for smartwatch as the wearable tech is still in the early stages for most markets. Whatsapp web would have been handy for people working in offices since they could view and send messages from their workstation without having to check their smartphones.
In 2016, Whatsapp started rolling out two-step verification feature for users on Android beta. The feature helped strengthen security by adding email id to a Whatsapp account. Whatsapp values user privacy. As Koum once said, “”We want to know as little about our users as possible. We don’t know your name, your gender… We designed our system to be as anonymous as possible. We’re not advertisement-driven, so we don’t need personal databases.”
By April 2016, Whatsapp had added end to end encryption. This meant enhanced data security for those who were concerned about their messages being eavesdropped by other people.
Today, after eight years the smartphone market is dominated by Android and iOS devices. Hence for any further developments, adding features to Android and iOS devices may suffice since the mobile platform is now concentrated in these two operating systems. As far as feature additions are concerned, Whatsapp should consider adding group calling feature. They can then directly compete with apps such as Hangouts and Skype.
While we may argue on what Whatsapp should and should not have done in their product journey, we have to understand that they managed to reach out to a wider audience without spending on marketing campaigns. They could do this because of the simplicity of the app, without loading the app with too many features, keeping the UI neat and clean that helped many people easily learn how to communicate with each other using the app. As Koum once said, “I want to do one thing, and do it well.”
