Whilst the developer in me appreciates the sentiments expressed in the article I have to point out that to build and app that is used by over 700 millions users you have to be focussed on a fairly narrow set of features. You need to execute those features very well and WhatsApp delivers.
Their original client works very well and was certainly the best im client at the time.
Now all that's keeping people there is network effect. Telegram is just better at this point, and it works on almost every platform with no weird restrictions
No it doesn't but it does have a public API, libraries and is friendly to third-party developers so nothing is stopping someone from creating a J2ME based client.
