WhatsApp was never a cash cow. Koum would sometimes turn on $1 annual subscription fees to slow down growth. However, it

Steering away from iOS wasn’t a popular decision in Silicon Valley at the time. CEOs in Pato Alto were quick to argue that Android users are less willing to pay and that the platform was difficult to build on due to fragmentation. These were sound arguments.

“Visiting my friends in Russia and Ukraine and Israel, I would see that Nokia was really really popular all over the world. And, for some reason, not in the United States.”

Even though WhatsApp 2.0 found its first success on the Apple App Store, it would have never become the world’s largest messaging platform just with iOS alone. Only 68 million Americans use Whatsapp — a minuscule number compared to its 1.6 billion user base.

Instead of playing along with Silicon Valley’s iOS-first agenda, Koum was quick to enroll WhatsApp versions for non-Apple devices. He launched WhatsApp on Android in August 2010 (just one year after the initial 2.0 success.) Nokia support was added in August 2011.

With push notifications now available, users started actively changing their status — because all other WhatsApp users on their contact list would get notifications. If you were a WhatsApp 1.0 user, here’s what your feed would look like:

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ed means it makes decisions for you. Hilt uses subcomponents for the component relationships, ready why here. If you’re a strong believer that your app is better off using component dependencies, Hilt is not the right tool for your app.

Koum, an immigrant and a traveler has seen firsthand that most people outside of the U.S. didn’t own iPhones. They owned Samsungs, Huaweis, Xiaomis, Nokias (which had its record year in 2007.)

“We made a commitment to build on Nokia early on. […] It actually helped fuel our growth in a big way, because there were a lot of Nokia users who wanted to connect and be a part of WhatsApp group chats and WhatsApp messaging with their friends.”

Enter WhatsApp 1.0. Enchanted by Apple’s newly-released SDK and empowered by address book APIs, Koum built an app that displayed user status on mobile phones. Desktop apps like Skype already had the feature (“away,” “busy,” “online,”) but mobile phones had no equivalent.

See how any of these notifications can instantly spark a conversation? Koum realized that people used WhatsApp not to see if other people were online, but to communicate their own activities. He realized that people wanted a messaging interface, not just a status one.

Koum quickly realized that it wasn’t the iOS-penetrated, English-speaking U.S. market that would form the critical mass of WhatsApp users. Free international messaging primarily appeals to people who have friends and partners abroad — which isn’t America’s strong suit. Americans travel and study abroad less, compared to Europeans and Asians.

Jan Koum’s journey is an embodiment of the hero’s journey in the 21st century. Here are four reasons why Koum’s little project turned into one of the biggest inventions of the last decade in just 5 years:

Previously, WhatsApp 1.0 users had to log in to the app to check on their friends’ statuses. It was a ritual you had to perform every time you wanted to call somebody. Too much work.

The iPhone had just been launched, and these were the pre-Messenger, pre-Instagram, pre-last-active days. Most voice calls would be preceded by a “hey, can you talk?” SMS conversation. The costs of these messages, if you were abroad, added up quickly.

“We noticed that people would use the status as a way to communicate with each other. They would change the status to say something like, ‘I’m going to a bar.’ And the change in status would broadcast to all the other people who used WhatsApp in your address book.”