[zalthor]

Yes, but also why should they? It’s not really in their interest to do so. The only reason they’re doing anything is because of regulatory pressure.

[sunshowers]

If you care about your customers, you care about them having a good experience when communicating with your non-customers.

[kredd]

Outside of small bubbles, it’s hard to believe that anyone really cares, since it’s a resolved problem in most of the world. Without exaggeration, every person I’ve met from Europe, LATAM, East/West/South Asia, Africa, and Australia has by default asked me, “Do you use WhatsApp (or its local equivalent)?” when we decided to keep in touch.

I agree it has some monopolistic tendencies in the US and Canada and signals “iPhone is better!” when someone is what they call “a green bubble.” However, in the end, every group chat just gets created in an OS-agnostic app if one of the users has an Android. So, from my perspective, it’s a wasteful allocation of resources if you’re trying to “make it a good experience for the customers to communicate with non-customers” since it doesn’t really get “much better” than what we have now.

[alt227]

> but also why should they?

Because allowing communication with open standards allows more freedom for your customers?

[MBCook]

Normal people don’t care about open standards. They only care about outcomes.

I know people who have wondered why texting to/from Android phones “doesn’t work” since pictures/video look terrible. This is a problem for their customers.

It wouldn’t surprise me if they would’ve done this without regulatory pressure, just perhaps not as soon.