September 19, 2010
It is hard to comprehend that 1992 was almost 20 years ago. It only seems like yesterday that Al Pacino delivered the performance of his life in Scent of a Woman - a performance that won him a best actor award. In that movie Lt. Col. Frank Slade says that "there isn't nothin' like the sight of an amputated spirit", but there is also nothin' like the sight of an abandoned blog. We are sorry we haven't kept in touch with you through this blog, but if there was ever a time to break the Radio Silence, now is the time.
The first item we would like to address is the stability of our system: Yes, we are well aware that last week has been pretty bad and we are doing everything we can to improve the stability of the service. We have made some architectural changes already and in the next 48 hours will be making more improvements to the system. WhatsApp very quickly has evolved into a large user community and we are fully aware of our commitment to provide you with excellent service.
The second item we want to talk about is product related. Two months ago we released our Nokia Symbian client and it is now available for download from our website. We are working on adding multi-media transfer functionality to the Nokia Symbian client and hope to have it ready for you soon. We have also released our Android 2.x client for download from our website. Further, if you have Android 2.2 you will enjoy our use of c2dm to help you save on battery life. Our Android client already has most of the features of the iPhone client and we will be making it available in the Android Marketplace shortly. The question we also get asked a lot about is group chat: yes, we are working on it as well and hope to have it available later this year.
The last item we would like to quickly address is the cost of the product. A small number of you have asked us why don't we switch to a free model and use advertising. The problem is that ads suck and ads suck even more on the small screen of a mobile device. We want to provide the best user experience and doing advertising will only get in the way of clean UI.
OK, we should now go back to working on the servers:)