Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

While many trumpeted Apple's iMessage app as game-changing, possibly ending stranglehold and cash cow the carriers have in text-messaging, we said what would really be needed to accomplish anything like that would be something cross-platform. While Google, Apple, Samsung, and others are building their own messaging apps, WhatsApp has been quietly building a monolithic messaging following.

The app works cross-platform, and the service delivers 1 billion messages a day on six different platforms (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Nokia S40 and Symbian S60 devices.

While WhatsApp is a telephony app, and uses your phone number (which means it won't work on an iPad, iPod touch, or tablet) to connect you with someone else, it uses your phone's data connection, not SMS. You can create group chats, send multimedia messages, are there are no special international charges, Oh, and did we mention it was cross-platform?

By using your phone number, the service eliminates the need for a separate account using your email address, which is what services like Yahoo! IM and the like do. It also uses the phone numbers of your contacts, and if they use WhatsApp, they will show up in the app. It really eliminates a lot of the issues around using IM instead of SMS.

On Android the app is free, unlike the App Store version for the iPhone, which costs $0.99. However, on Android, after the first year, you're charged $1.99 annually. The $1.99 seems pretty consistent across the other platforms, aside from the iPhone, pointing to what we already know: it's a lot easier to "sell" something on iOS than any other platform.

It's an interesting success story, and by going platform-independent they've done what we said needed to be done in order to truly be disruptive to the carrier text-messaging cash cow. The big problem remains that until everyone begins using WhatsApp, you'd need to keep your SMS plan active.

Undeniably, it's still annoying, but it's possible you could drop your messaging plan down to the lowest possible on your carrier. Except, of course, for AT&T, which has noted the proliferation of these sorts of services, and has dropped all but its unlimited messaging plan.

GigaOM has a nice article on the company that you can read here.