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?
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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Remember paid text messaging? That lasted longer in other parts of the world than it did in the US and WhatsApp circumvented that. Also, WhatsApp allowed audio calls to long distance numbers over wifi or data, not the pricy long distance call charge.
From what I can tell, that's largely it.
With my first prepaid phone in Germany texts did cost 0.49 € per text. So I did not use them super often. Years later around 2011 that price had decreased to 0.15€ and I was texting friends a lot during uni. Around the same time me and my friends got our first smartphones with contracts for 30-40€ per month that included a small bit of data (below 1Gb). Texts still did cost 0.15€, but the data for a WhatsApp message was in the low kilobytes. So a lot of people switched to WhatsApp
SMS was free when I started using WhatsApp, but MMS wasn't, so I think that was part of why it took off in the UK. You could finally send pictures and videos and have read receipts and typing indicators and group chats. Plus it was instant and reliable where SMS always felt slow and unreliable.
Also it worked on WiFi so you could still use it at home where you might not have had the best phone signal.
It became popular when you had to pay for it. It was a one off fee on iPhone or an annual recurring fee on Android, that's how much people wanted to get away from SMS.
Probably worth noting that BBM was very popular at that time too but it was exclusive to BlackBerry phones so the concept wasn't new, but everyone that started moving to iPhone and Android after blackberry wanted the same messaging experience, and WhatsApp provided that.
I'll never really understand why the north American market didn't make the jump like everyone else did, because WhatsApp provided so much more, it wasn't just about cost of messaging.
iMessage is probably why WhatsApp didn't take off as much in the US, plus tons of alternate messaging platforms, I used to use FB messenger a LOT. Mostly use discord for friends and SMS for family, some of my friends use line too but I'm not a fan.
Also MMS is fucking cancer
This