App Store Essentials: WhatsApp Messenger

WhatsAaaaaaaaaaaaaaapp!

How much would you pay as a one-off fee to be able to text, MMS and push-to-talk with your iPhone or iPod touch-owning friends and family as much as you like, forever? $1,000? $100? $10?? How about $1.29? Sounds nuts, but with WhatsApp Messenger that’s exactly what you’re getting. Read on to find out how you could save a bucket load on your mobile bill.

My list of friends. Edited, naturally. Honest.

WhatsApp Messenger is like the iPhone’s native messaging app on steroids. To get started, you need to purchase the app and persuade any iPhone or iPod touch owners in your circle of friends to do the same. Once installed, there’s no messing around with usernames and passwords – all you need to do is tell it your mobile number and your name and you’re good to go.

Scinitilating conversation

To initiate a chat, WhatsApp Messenger gives you access to your iPhone’s contacts list. When you select a contact who doesn’t have WhatsApp, you’ll be given the choice of email, text or calling – but these options simply redirect you to the appropriate existing iPhone function. However, when you select a contact who also has WhatsApp, you will see a ‘chat’ option and this is where the fun begins. You’ll be launched into familiar territory – the UI very closely resembles the iChat-like format of the iPhone messaging app with you on the right of the screen, your contact on the left, and speech bubbles indicating the flow of the conversation. Contacts you chat with most often can be added to a ‘favourites’ list which makes getting started faster in the future.

Push notification

If somebody sends you a message when you don’t have the app open, no problem – you will receive a push notification with a preview of the message. Hitting ‘view’ will launch WhatsApp and take you straight to the conversation so that you can carry on chatting. There are other apps that do this, the most well known of which being Ping! by Gary Fung, but in our trials we found that app to be very unreliable. Messages would often disappear and you were left not knowing whether your message had reached your recipient and consequentially you would more often-than-not end up texting or calling them anyway, thereby defeating the purpose of the app.

WhatsApp improves on Ping! in a number of ways. Firstly, it is extremely reliable. In the few weeks that we have been using it we have not seen a single message go missing or delayed by more than a few seconds. Furthermore, the app tells you exactly when your message has been sent to the server and again when it has been displayed in the screen of the recipients device, leaving you with absolute certainty about what is going on at the other end.

Note the 'S' and 'D' indicators in red

How is that achieved? Well, when you type a message to a contact who does not currently have the app open, the last date and time when WhatsApp ‘saw’ them is displayed at the top of the screen. When you send your message, after about half a second you will see a small red ‘S’ appear next to the timestamp of your message. This means that the message has been ‘sent’ and is sitting on the WhatsApp server. When your recipient receives their push notification and hits ‘view’, the ‘S’ will change to a ‘D’ meaning ‘delivered’ and you will see their status change to ‘online’. It will even tell you when they are typing their response to you. It is, quite frankly, perfection itself.

Dan sending me an image

But the magic doesn’t end there. WhatsApp also gives you access to your camera, allowing you to take and send a photo or a video clip and thereby emulating MMS functionality. You can also send an existing photo that is on your camera roll or record a sound clip and send it, like push-to-talk. Again, all of these are delivered to the recipient with push notification.

This app is now sitting in pride-of-place on page one of my Home screen, and I don’t imagine it being moved any time soon. The only let-down is that it is only for iPhone-to-iPhone (or iPod touch), but that is understandable. (Update – apparently a Blackberry version is coming soon and will work cross-platform).

At $1.29 it is startling value – even if you only know one other person with an iPhone it is well worth the purchase as the potential for savings is massive. I estimate that I am personally saving at the very least $20 per month by using WhatsApp instead of using SMS / MMS where possible.

This app very appropriately takes up residence in our list of App Store Essentials – hit the link below to download it.

[iTunes link]

Got any other money-saving app recommendations? Share your tips in the comments!