Whatsapp Voice

RTC is speeding. Do you remember – just a few weeks ago there were 700 million monthly active Whatsapp users. Now it just passed 800 million monthly active users!

Whatsapp is also rolling out with voice calls! That can be a really bad news for operators. Does it mean that everyone will use Whatsapp now? Maybe – I’ve just found a post written by Dan York

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Oh, and it’s owned by Facebook! 🙂

Now, I personally don’t use WhatsApp that much right now. The people who I want to message are primarily using iMessage, Facebook Messenger or Wire. (And every once in a great while I’ll fire up Skype on my iPhone.)

But obviously there are 800 million people who do use WhatsApp each month… and they now have free calling! (If they are on Android, iOS or BlackBerry 10… and subject to a staggered rollout, i.e. people will get the actual ability to call over the next while.) It will be fascinating to see how this plays out.

The problem of universal id (WhatsApp, Skype, Viber, telcos …) can be solve already by OAuth and  OpenID which are taking over. So the only issue which remains is who will pay the bill at the end 🙂

If you are interested in some technical details and in what has the WhatsApp in common with the WebRTC, you can find an interesting post on https://webrtchacks.com/whats-up-with-whatsapp-and-webrtc/