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WhatsApp VOIP

WhatsApp, the instant-messaging app for smartphones, is huge. As of the beginning of January, they claimed 700 million monthly active users, sending 30 billion messages daily…30 billion! This shows what an integral part of our lives WhatsApp has become and it is definitely the most-used app on many people’s phones.

Having largely replaced old-school text messaging, WhatsApp has now targeted traditional voice calls for as it gets ready to launch its own integrated VOIP (voice over IP) calling service in the next few weeks.

This launch has been getting quite a bit of press coverage and the cellular networks are supposedly running scared. How will they react to a large chunk of their revenue being usurped by the much cheaper VOIP calls that see you use data to make the call? Will the networks charge more for VOIP traffic than for normal data or will they require certain add-on bundles or special packages for those who want to use VOIP calling services?

There are some pertinent questions here, but I’ll leave that to MyBroadband to investigate.
But the real question I have is, “how much of an impact will this really make in the market?” The concept of VOIP calling on cellphones isn’t actually new at all – You can call using Skype, Viber, FaceTime, and even Facebook (surprisingly, most people don’t even know about this feature). And these apps are much cheaper than traditional calling.

But despite the proliferation of such apps, many people seem far happier making regular calls. I recently conducted a small survey of the people I know and most of them don’t make many VOIP calls at all. And if they do, it’s only to call friends and family overseas.
Now it’s true that WhatsApp is a lot more ubiquitous than these other platforms but does that mean it will push people to change their calling behaviour? Cellphone users are just so used to the normal flow of placing a call and I have a feeling that many won’t bother with creating the new habits required to achieve the same result (albeit at a potentially lower price).

Plus, post-paid cellphone users all have some amount of included bundled calls in their package which they don’t mind using. This may well change when all voice usage moves to the data pipes but we’re not quite there yet.

I think this will be a fascinating case study in user experience design. The success of WhatsApp’s voice calling could possibly rest on how well they implement it from a UI (user interface) perspective. Their challenge is to make the placing of a WhatsApp voice call so incredibly easy, so intuitive, and so well integrated into the existing, well-used WhatsApp ecosystem that people can’t help but start using it. Having clear call quality and quick connection times wouldn’t hurt either!

So, will this feature mark a turning point for how we use our phones? Will it herald in a new era for the service providers, who will have to deal with this change in behaviour, and potential drop in associated revenue? Or will it remain a fringe feature used to call a friend when they’re overseas? I’d be really interested to hear your views on the topic.

Please let me know what you think in the comments below.
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