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?
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.
Also MMS is fucking cancer
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.
This
SMS used to be the standard way of messaging people on a cellphone. Since a European country is about the size of one US state, it’s pretty common to have friends, family or other people you have to message in another European country. Many carriers still charge additional fees for sending SMS messages to other EU countries. So Europeans needed some way of messaging people in other countries for free. That’s where WhatsApp came in, it’s designed for phones and simpler to use than Email. In 2013, WhatsApp was bought by Facebook, which later became Meta. It’s basically the same for other countries that rely on WhatsApp, they need to send messages to foreign countries frequently, which can become quite expensive when using SMS. Americans never needed WhatsApp, because they don’t have to message people in foreign countries as often as Europeans, and they often have unlimited SMS included in their cell plans.
While it is historically true, carriers cannot charge foreign fees for EU members since some time now. They basically said to the carriers “now you stop being greedy fucks”.
Since then the European Union is just one large country phone fees wise. Even non EU member Switzerland is included on the EU plan and Switzerland includes Europe as if it is national call/text.
But it was too late indeed, people were already on WhatsApp to avoid sms.
To the best of my knowledge Switzerland is not included. 0.70€/sms
Yo wtf, these prices are crazy
Welcome to abroad roaming where a minute of calling costs you an arm and a leg.
Don’t even think doing roaming in a foreign land. You will be charged two arms.
Can confirm, when I crossed the border from Italy my existing deal was no longer valid so my connection just dropped.
Ah ok, mine have Switzerland and other non EU (but close) countries.
Yeah that was in 2018. But WhatsApp was already by far the most popular messenger by then.
This has been a thing since when?
I found an article stating 06.2017 as a start date for free EU roaming.
With that in mind since when did smartphones became the norm? About 2011/12?WhatsApp is basically a full replacement of what iMessage does to some degree and what RCS aspires to be. Everyone cam use it, is free and even the older non-tech folks can use it.
Now try moving those older folks to use some other app. You can’t even make them to use apps like Telegram or Signal or Threema.I think they were just pointing out that the roaming fees are a thing of the past, because the previous comment sounded like that’s still a thing.
Even with the unified roaming prices, to this day I don’t have sms included, but I have 30gb of data.
They can and they do. roaming became free but international calls are still expensive (not as bad as it used to be but still) calling a different country cost me about 20 cents per minute, that’s 1 euro for a 5 minute call. unless of course I physically cross the border.
Also in the US the plans had free unlimited sms early on and people just stick with it. They know a number will receive a text message they don’t on now if they have Whatsapp.
You can’t send someone a message unless they have WhatsApp.
Maybe this is true for some regions, but in general the reason was money. SMS costs money, Whatsapp intially had a low one time or annual fee that was way below what you used to pay for a few SMS, but you got better service than MMS for that fee. And now it’s free and sustained by network effects.
This is the best answer.
Source: American, but I’ve spent the past 6 years living across Asia and Europe.
Okay your answer annoyed me because I don’t see how the size of european countries really relates, whatsapp was popular because of group text functionality and messages being free I don’t think it had anything to do with international communication, that said whatsapp and viber took off during the recession when emigration was rampant so there could be something there.
Anyway, I went to investigate and the average US state is larger than the average EU country by quite the margin 190,000 sqkm to 126,000 sqkm.
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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.Texts are not free in many countries to this day.
That’s fucking weird
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.
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.
I remember the days of the 100 SMS limits and wensites for texting. I had a second SIM card which I could switch to in case I went over the 100 SMS. Then I moved to the US and it was free SMS! WhatsApp was also $1 back then so people who just use the in-built messaging app if they didn’t have anyone residing outside the US. US is still ridiculously expensive for phone and data plans.
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.
In Canada, text is free and data is still expensive. I believe the most expensive in the entire world! Yay!
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?
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.
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.
People who care about you might switch to signal.
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.
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?
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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.
Because in other countries everyone uses WhatsApp, it’s sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. As for why the US kept using text messages while everyone else moved to WhatsApp, that’s because texting in the US became very cheap while it was still very expensive in other countries.
To reply to your edit:
OP is asking why the rest of the world adopted whatsapp, but not the US. Your reply doesn’t really go into any differences between the states and the rest of the world. Everything you’ve said could as easily apply anywhere worldwide.
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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 ;)
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.
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.
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
Also, huge portions of first gen Latinos in America use Whatsapp too - because it’s what they’re used to, to talk to family back home, etc. I worked with a immigration org for a bit and everything was Signal or Whatsapp.
Americans also expected me to leave a voice message instead of sending an SMS when I didn’t reach them. That was quite a culture shock for me.
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.
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
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
The US of still slight more Android than iPhone as well
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
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.
Because in North America it’s only used by shitty employers and crypto scams.
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.
Apple is adopting RCS this year
But not the google proprietary RCS
Thats good to hear but its hard to switch away from an established product. For example, there is Signal, which has all of WhatsApps features and is completely privacy-oriented but everyone would have to switch at once for it to work…
There is a big uproar about Apple not using googles RCS because (and if I remember correctly) googles RCS is a walled off garden much like iMessage so when Apple does implement RCS it still won’t work on Google devices. Might have to fact check me but I believe that was the early consensus.
It will as far as I know, it just won’t work with the additional features Google have slapped on top but haven’t bothered to try to include in the open standard. It makes sense why people would want it since it includes stuff like E2E encryption, but it’s better this way, since like this the open standard actually has the chance to get these features in the future.
I’d assume because share of android phones is much larger in the EU and they don’t come with dedicated messenger app like the iPhone.
The difference is only about 10%, so market share likely isn’t the cause.
The US phone market is around 60% iPhones compared to 35% in the EU.
Depends on your source, because the numbers I found were 35/25.
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.
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
Apple is 61.26% according to this article. Have you found a more accurate source?
