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234

Why is WhatsApp so ubiquitous everywhere BUT North America? (midwest.social)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (5 children)

You use iMessage, but that is an Apple-specific thing and can't even be used on Android phones. Also, Apple does the whole "green bubble blue bubble" thing you got going on and deliberately doesnt support RCS (which would bring stuff like image support to SMS). So we need a messenger than can be used on both iPhones and Android phones. WhatsApp was initially the most popular and thats why it still is.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

Because in North America it's only used by shitty employers and crypto scams.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Others have replied with the reasons, i.e. data vs SMS price. I would just like to comment on:

however no one on my continent uses it. Why is it so popular in the EU and other parts of the world?

No one in your country uses it, people definitely use it on your continent. Latin America is almost 100% WhatsApp, SMS are seen as obsolete there, even if you meant North America Mexico uses WhatsApp. I think the only countries in the world that use SMS are the US and Canada, which coincidentally are the only countries I've visited where I had to worry about running out of data on my phone.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I'd be surprised if people avoid Internet-based messaging because they're worried about data usage. Text messages use a tiny amount such that they work well even on a throttled connection.

The fact that unlimited SMS became common early in the USA, and few people are messaging internationally probably explains it better.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

I would add - US is a load of states but one country; EU is a load of countries. It costs more to text another country, and it used to cost more to use data in another country.

Then the EU said fuck that you greedy cunts and made it illegal to charge more for data while abroad

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

In the US. We use WhatsApp for our family chat because we're a mixture of Android and Apple. Messages don't deliver reliably on standard messaging apps.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

In Quebec a lot of people use it so it's not unheard of on North America.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

How do thing like rich media, groups, etc work on sms? All these features are baked into messaging apps over data...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service

Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) is a standard way to send messages that include multimedia content to and from a mobile phone over a cellular network. Users and providers may refer to such a message as a PXT, a picture message, or a multimedia message. The MMS standard extends the core SMS (Short Message Service) capability, allowing the exchange of text messages greater than 160 characters in length. Unlike text-only SMS, MMS can deliver a variety of media, including up to forty seconds of video, one image, a slideshow of multiple images, or audio.

SMS does support group messaging too, but I don't know the term for the protocol there.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Pretty much everyone I know uses it in Canada. I regularly cause problems when I refuse to use it cause Facebook

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

I uninstalled it when FB acquired it.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

While I agree iPhone market share in the US plays a role too, WhatsApp came out in 2009 - two years before iMessage was launched.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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 to use Whatsapp. And once that ball is rolling it becomes very hard to stop.

These days people use Whatsapp because everyone else uses Whatsapp.
It's the assumed default.

Edit: Heck.. even to this day I have limited text messages.
My current cellphone plan is for 12 GB, Unlimited calls, and 500 texts.

And I've not sent a single text message in months, if not years.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 70 points 9 months ago (5 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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 Matrix

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

People who care about you might switch to signal.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago

I didn't see it as judgemental, sorry if I came off as defensive. I just wanted to provide a different viewpoint :)

[–] [email protected] 194 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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

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