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0 pointsillicium11y ago0 comments

XMPP, as a standard, was too slow to adopt mobile, so the cool apps had to invent their own messaging protocol (perhaps on top of XMPP) to get push notifications and such.

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3 comments · 3 top-level

takeda11y ago

All they had to do is release their protocol specification, kind of like they did with SPDY.

It's quite obvious that when they started they were small compared to AIM, MSN, YIM and others so they used XMPP to help gain traction, once they became huge they dropped interoperability to lock users inside.

Do no evil my ass.

metajack11y ago

I can't understand this argument. There was not much extra stuff needed for mobile and most of the specs for it were written long ago. I suspect more people liked reinventing this easy-seeming wheel rather than XMPP was not ready.

iopq11y ago

I'm running Xabber on my phone and I refuse to use WhatsApp. Why would I pay for something when Xabber is free? WhatsApp is also a pain to install and verify your number if you don't have texting.

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