I read about WhatsApp and how people can’t part with Meta because of it, however no one on my continent uses it. Why is it so popular in the EU and other parts of the world?
Wait, what do Americans use? Only Signal and Telegram?
I have never “used a chat app” ever until I made friends in Europe. I just used the OS messaging. Which I assume means SMS.
SMS and iMessage.
FB Messenger is the dominant platform of the US
Even before WhatsApp I used a similar app called Yak! It didn’t have any limit on how long messages you could send, you could send pictures too and the UI was much more polished compared to the messaging apps on phones. Also not everyone had unlimited text messages but everyone had a data plan that effectively enabled unlimited messages over the internet.
I even had an iPhone back then. Never got into iMessages. Even iPhone users all have whatsapp now.
I would like to say because we are smart enough not to use any programs or apps made by the Facebook company, who is notorious for spying on people in every way possible, but that is not the case for a lot of NA residents. It is the reason that I’ve never used it though. Also because Signal Messenger exists and is better in every way than Whatsapp.
No, we’re not. That’s an insane notion.
If anything it’s the other way around.
It’s not an insane notion if you actually read the whole sentence, and understand what it means. “but that is not the case for a lot of NA residents” is important to the meaning of that sentence.
When WhatsApp got popular in Europe it wasn’t owned by Facebook yet, they only acquired it after it was already the ‘default’ messaging app.
It’s because back when smartphones and Whatsapp were new, unlimited text messaging plans were either expensive or unavailable in much of Europe (and I would imagine other places as well). From my understanding these kinds of plans were much more common in America.
When your cellphone plan has limited text messages, but sending messages via Whatsapp takes so little data that it might as well be unlimited, the barrier to early adoption becomes very low. So people start using Whatsapp, and get their friends on Whatsapp. And once that ball is rolling it becomes very hard to stop.
These days people use Whatsapp because everyone else uses Whatsapp.
We’re asking the opposite question outside the states. Why is text messaging so popular in the states, to the point a blue / green checkmark is cause for teenage bullying?
To provide context, WhatsApp and its ilk came along way before RCS was a thing (it existed, but nobody implemented it). They were widely adopted due to their vast improvement over existing text messaging. So the better question is, why did the states cling to text messaging and never adopted 3rd party chat apps?
adding another question to it, how do people using sms manage to message people while still getting all those pesky sms ads/spams? i don’t use an iphone so i am wondering how iMessage handles it.
I don’t understand the question. why would receiving spam interfere with messaging people?
I didn’t mean to frame the question as a judgemental post towards WhatsApp users. I’m genuinely curious. SMS sucks, and id gladly use WhatsApp if it was popular here. Instead I resort to things like Discord or RCS chats when available.
People who care about you might switch to signal.
I didn’t see it as judgemental, sorry if I came off as defensive. I just wanted to provide a different viewpoint :)
From my own experience as someone living in the UK, probably two reasons, for those countries at least.
- Early adoption of the iPhone in the US vs UK
- Different price structures between US and UK
In the 2000s, most people who liked to message a lot in the UK (generally young people and teens) were on pay-as-you-go ‘top up’ plans where each individual message had a cost. SMS messages cost anything from 1 pence to 5 pence, and I remember on my plan, MMS (picture messages) cost a ridiculous 12 pence each! It was expensive. Most people (and especially younger people) had Android phones, and so as soon as a credible Internet-based messenger became popular, people flocked in droves to jump to it. It was WhatsApp in the UK which won that race, and it remains the de-facto messenger to this day.
Things were different in the US. The iPhone got a huge early foothold in sales, and iMessage became dominant simply by being first to market and gaining critical mass. It was also more common (versus the UK) for people to be on contract plans that had SMS and MMS included as part of the plan cost, so even for people who didn’t have iPhones there was less financial incentive to dump those technologies and SMS remained prevalent.
That’s the right question.
Sms is actually outdated and apple is stubborn in it Usa should had migrated to a privacy friendly alternative like signal or MatrixThe average Joe uses apple and thus their per-installed apps, Joe has a wrong idea about privacy friendly or secure protocols that apps like signal or matrix have. In a near future, Joe will communicate his friends between different meta apps using the signal protocol and still will consider signal a bad choice just because its marketing is weak compared to meta in the app store. The funny thing is that I’ve back to use whatsapp because most of my fellow US citizens use meta instead of signal or matrix or the fediverse ¯(°_o)/¯
The average Joe uses apple and thus their per-installed apps
Well not so much huge parts of the world where iMessage isn’t used
Right, but we’re talking about the popularity of text messages in the (U)States(A). And usually we don’t call average Joe to someone out of the States ;)
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That’s obviously true worldwide, but nobody uses the default messaging apps outside the states. So I’m not sure what your comment is meant to illustrate.
I’m in the US. For me, I didn’t start using Whatsapp over text messaging because I didn’t have a need to add and learn another app. I only started using Whatsapp when I joined social groups that insisted on it for group messaging. I still prefer messaging via Google messages over Whatsapp.
Because txt was free over here before Europe. And people are lazy to switch.
Texts still aren’t free in Germany, most of the time, they usually cost around 10 cents each. Sure, you can get free texts for around 2€ a month, but it’s an optional add-on to your plan and not worth it for many people. Especially as everyone uses WhatsApp or Signal anyway, which are basically free (pretty much everyone has a data plan, obviously).
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That’s a really bad argument.
Texts got free (or cheap enough not to matter) way before having data enabled on your phone 24/7 was not too expensive.That’s maybe like that in the US, but not in Germany. To this day we have like 50 % contracts that have unlimited calls, 10ish GB of data and a fixed price of ~9 ct per text.
Texts are not free in many countries to this day.
I’m in my forties so I was around when cell phones first became a thing and you had to T9 type your messages and was in my late twenties when smartphones became a things. The cost is the right answer. It was much cheaper in the states to txt earlier than other places. So the US stuck with SMS longer as that’s what people were used to and it eventually became free while in other parts of the world it did not but data and WiFi became more affordable, so people jumped to IM.
In Canada, text is free and data is still expensive. I believe the most expensive in the entire world! Yay!
No they didn’t, I’ve had phone plans with enough data to use WhatsApp 24/7 (around 2011 probably) way before unlimited texts (don’t know because I haven’t used SMS since forever). In fact I remember way back in 2008 using a website from my phone to send SMS instead of sending them from the phone because it was cheaper. Heck, I think I got unlimited data for WhatsApp before I got unlimited texts, and in fact my current plan has unlimited data but only 100 SMS (or something, I don’t know because I don’t use it).
But the important detail is that I’m not in the US, and this is what you’re missing. In the US for some reason SMS became cheaper, in the rest of the world data became cheaper, which is why still to this day we pay for SMS but get unlimited data whereas in the US it’s the other way around.
And most importantly SMS can’t share all the data WhatsApp and others can. Be it images, videos, locations and similar. Add to that local WIFI which extends life on your data plan and you get more convenience at cheaper prices with extra features. Cell phone network providers really shot themselves in the foot with that one.
AFAIK: First one to be available on mobile and was independent too. Yes there was a time when WhatsApp was not infested by what we know as meta now. Also people are LAZY DUCKS and don’t want to put in the most minimal of efforts to switch to different platforms.
While I agree that laziness could contribute, you can’t just decide to swap, everyone would have to swop. Especially when Whatsapp is so common in the workplace now.
Probably because iOS is extremely dominant in North America, and iMessage is preinstalled on every iPhone. To talk to someone on WhatsApp or any other chat app, installing the app isn’t enough, but you also need the other person to have it. Since in North America’s most popular mobile OS is iOS, people don’t feel the need to install another app.
On Android on the other hand, Google didn’t enable RCS by default until 2023. RCS has existed before iMessage and even before WhatsApp, but it was poorly marketed. I, as a fairly tech savvy person, only heard about RCS in 2022 when headlines about it were flooding my feed.
Google is also partly to blame, since they had so many chat services that were available simultaneously and almost all of them were short-lived. Google Talk, Google+ Hangout, Google Hangout, Google Chat, Google Meet, Google Duo, and Google Allo. Not to mention the other chat apps that flooded the app store, like WhatsApp, Line (which is very dominant in Japan), Facebook messenger, Telegram…
iOS is less than half the phones in the US
Because in North America it’s only used by shitty employers and crypto scams.
In Quebec a lot of people use it so it’s not unheard of on North America.
I think iMessage and whatever Google had at the time were “good enough” here that WhatsApp never caught on? Like most people already had unlimited texting by the time it hit the scene, so It just felt like a scam back in the day and I remember it wanted my phone number to complete a sign-up and I was damned if I was going to give it to them.
Hell, unlimited texting plans had already been around for a while by the time smartphones with apps were even a thing
How do thing like rich media, groups, etc work on sms? All these features are baked into messaging apps over data…
It’s not necessarily in parts of Asia, either. Most people in Japan use LINE. China obviously has its own domestic apps. I think South Korea generally uses kakaotalk
IMO: iPhones are the minority in the world apart from North America.
Whatsapp became the main “secure” chat service on Android, but iOS always had its own iMessage feature so WhatsApp isnt needed if you’re somewhere with basically zero android phones.
While I agree iPhone market share in the US plays a role too, WhatsApp came out in 2009 - two years before iMessage was launched.
Native apps like iMessage tend to crush third party apps like WhatsApp and messenger to a point.
Look at the rise of Internet Explorer and the fall of Netscape on windows. The rise of chrome and safari on Android and Mac respectively
Pretty much everyone I know uses it in Canada. I regularly cause problems when I refuse to use it cause Facebook
Where are you in Canada? I’m in New Brunswick and I’ve never met a Canadian who uses WhatsApp (except to keep in touch with friends abroad).
Round these parts, people usually use Messenger or Instagram.
I uninstalled it when FB acquired it.
