Where Network effects take precedence over an arguably better product - WhatsApp v/s Telegram

There are a bazillion messaging apps available today and globally, WhatsApp is the undisputed leader. So while there are regional messaging leaders like LINE, WeChat, Kakao, and maybe a few others - but at 2+ billion MAUs globally, no one comes close. Telegram at ~ 600 million MAU is a distant second to WhatsApp. Given that almost everyone congregated on WhatsApp (at least in India), most of us never had a real need for an alternate messaging app.

In April'21 however, when the covid situation in India worsened, people had to come together and WhatsApp being restrictive to 256 members on a group - Telegram saw a lot of support groups popping up. That was my foray into using Telegram rather more closely.

Now after having used Telegram a decent bit in those 4-5 months, I came away pretty impressed with the performance as a product. So while it still isn't the go-to messaging platform for most of us, it made me wonder about the features that WhatsApp has been lagging in terms of product improvements when compared to Telegram. And how despite being an arguably better product than WhatsApp (of course, your view may vary) - Telegram still doesn't pose as a serious enough competition.

So this is a post to pose the question - With the adoption that WhatsApp has globally, has there been enough depth in terms of product offerings?

Now of course WhatsApp is an amazing product, they don't need my validation on it. So the features WhatsApp has are nice and dandy. What's missing are a set of features to make it more useful for the users. Just to be clear - I'm NOT signaling for a feature factory. I'm not asking for a messaging app that starts with messaging, becomes a fintech, a metaverse company, and then also starts delivering groceries.

I'm asking the messaging app to cover a few pain points that seem obvious enough - within the ambit of social messaging. Here are a few use cases that even as a casual WhatsApp user (my daily usage is less than 30 mins) - I'd ask for and bemused on why WhatsApp hasn't delivered on them.

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Use case 1 - Creating a Bookmark feature: Four years back, I created a group on WhatsApp with just me - to upload interesting links for future reading or cataloging. I know of numerous folks who have also done that since a fair amount of reading recommendations are through DMs. So why not create a simple feature of Bookmarks that have been present since the days of yore? Telegram has this feature of "Saved Messages" where you can forward any relevant content to be examined later.

Use case 2 - Surgical Search: Let's say a certain WhatsApp group has had 150 messages exchanged in a week. You'd like to read up on them in your own time but need to search for a certain keyword or a certain message exchanged in the past.

You click on that WhatsApp group and now WhatsApp would consider all those 150 messages to have been 'read' - without you actually having scrolled or read through them. And all you wanted to know was the name of the TV series that was recommended in the group 2 weeks back. Baffling stuff, right?

Telegram doesn't do all this crap. It considers messages to have been read once they have been scrolled through. That's what it ideally should be. Even in the scenario where you have 20K unread messages and all you want to read are the recent ones, you can use the quick scroll feature to jump to the latest message.

Use case 3 - Using the read receipt feature effectively: On WhatsApp, you can turn off the read receipts for the 1:1 chats but not for group chats. I still don't get the logic of why would they need it to keep it like this. The very fact that someone isn't comfortable keeping the read receipts ON should beget to extending the option over groups as well.

Use case 4 - Groups limited to 256 folks: You can't create bigger groups than 256 folks in WhatsApp. These become especially tight when creating covid support groups, social causes with a large enough interested base of users, and university alumni groups for example. If you were thinking getting into the uni was tough, try getting into the alumni WhatsApp group and the former would feel like a cakewalk.

Use case 5: Search experience to be improved: Try searching for a string like food on your WhatsApp and expectedly, you get multiple search results. Now if you'd like to filter by date range or a specific person or certain groups, none of those options are provided. Good luck trawling through hundreds of messages to find the needle in the haystack.

Use case 6: Collating unread chats in one window: Let's say you have 59 unread chats - and you want to go through them in one go over a weekend. There's no option to find those unread chats in one place unless you go scour through the list of all the chats. Cue to Slack that has solved this problem where all the unread DMs can be collated in one place.

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There are many more use cases but you get the drift. WhatsApp is amazing in what it does but it's painfully slow in solving some of these arguably relevant messaging use cases. In all these facets, Telegram is miles ahead.

I acknowledge the fact that WhatsApp has been much more under scrutiny regarding its data privacy concerns and managing fake news. Given that a large portion of news distribution happens through WhatsApp, it has been tasked to better manage the quality of content forwarded. Telegram doesn't necessarily need to do all of this to the tune WhatsApp needs to

However, one gotta wonder that if Facebook can't muster enough resources to create these options for the users, who else can? I have tried to think it multiple times on if any of the above asks are corner cases but none of them seem too niche. I'm sure the power users would have tons of other features to ask for.

This brings us to the idea that one could have a stronger product but may still be a second choice to a product that has far better network effects or distribution. WhatsApp became ubiquitous before Telegram could get mainstream enough. Then it was bought by Facebook and now there are all sorts of dependencies and use cases built on top of it.

For the typical person, there are already too many platforms for communication - WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, SnapChat. So seldom does one need two standalone messaging apps. Given almost all of our network is on WhatsApp, there's not a lot of incentive to use Telegram.

So even though Telegram arguably has better features and serves a lot of genuine use cases, it doesn't have as much adoption - primarily because WhatsApp has had stronger network effects. Like they say - Distribution > Product.

I'd be keen to learn a different perspective on this. Thanks.