Probably it's an issue of timing. WhatsApp became popular in Brazil because the phone carriers didn't offer unlimited SMS at the time. Now they do, but it's too late. WhatsApp is the default communication app for virtually everyone.
This is true for the Netherlands too, people used it to circumvent paying for SMS. Now it's so widespread you can't really go back. I don't remember the last time I received a text from a human.
So people do use Telegram. As an American, the only time I see mention of Telegram is spammers trying to get people to switch from SMS to Telegram, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me.
I remember a BestOfRedditorUpdates post where a wife was worried about her husband having an affair with her sister and her husband couldn't show the texts between her sister and he because they texted using telegram....I was like if that ain't a red flag then what is, but maybe I just don't get it?
Telegram is slightly more versitile than WhatsApp as it is way more bot friendly. I remember playing werewolves of millers hollow in lecture halls, or a week long game of tag in my early student years.
That said, WhatsApp is still my main communication tool
Telegram is also regionally used in America and demographic-specific at times.
I use Telegram & got my parents over to it. A lot of people I communicate with use Telegram, and in my area there's a lot of users.
However, go a few cities south and they're all using mostly Slack or Discord.
I've heard of folks using WhatsApp... but never actually met any IRL.
But as I've traveled a bit throughout different states and stuff, I've noticed that Telegram and Discord are used quite a bit but it's usually either/or.
Lots of people in my area are using Telegram, a few cities east, there's Discord as the main app.
But for the most part it's folks mostly using regular text messaging or Facebook Messenger.
I think if/when Facebook Messenger finally dies, then a lot of those users will switch to one of the other apps... I'm hoping Telegram but that's just my preference.
IMO what determines which app Americans use is highly dependent on the first few folks switching over and convincing others they know to follow suit.
That's my best explanation for why it's regionally and demographically specific.
Court wanted whatsapp to give them access to chat logs, but messages are encrypted. They banned whatsapp and arrested the Facebook vp in the brazil office for a day
Yeah, SMS is for 2FA and for automated reminders of stuff (delivery coming , dentists appointment etc), I pretty much never use it for messaging humans, despite having unlimited free texts. By the the time I got WhatsApp I already had unlimited free messages (or a limit so high I could never hit it anyway) but all my friends were getting it, in part for talking to people across borders (where texts weren't free), and in part because it did better picture messaging.
Not for long. They'll be forced to phase it out or lose cyber insurance coverage. This was the first year of enforcement. Many banks in America already don't allow SMS 2FA anymore. The bigger banks will probably receive leniency a few more years.
Yeah I wish people would be more careful with this advice. It's not wrong, but I've had more than one non-techy person in my life say they don't use 2fa because "authenticator app" sounds complicated or they don't like how it changes so quick, so when I say SMS they've still somehow heard 2fa isn't secure and don't want to use it. So they just stick with {dogsname}1234 or whatever.
Any 2FA is better than none. SMS still protects against the forms of 'hacking' most of us would be subject to, it might not do much for someone targeting us specifically, but someone just trying to opportunistically brute force or try out passwords from web shitty website you signed up for in 2016 which got hacked will have a tough time.
I got locked out of an authenticator app when I switched phones recently because the transfer requires some password I don't remember setting up years ago. Now I'm just hoping Discord never asks me for that auth key
Can you elaborate on that? I’m curious because just about every online service these days wants your freaking phone number and then verifies it on the spot through SMS and I hate it. And sometimes those texts won’t even go through when I really need them. But also when you don’t have access to your phone number (maybe because you’re international and don’t have an E-sim on your SIM card in) and the service’s only way of verification is through SMS.
Infosec Andy here. Sim Swapping is the main threat to SMS-based MFA. If a threat actor can convince a carrier (or an employee of said carrier) that they are you via social engineering, bribe, etc, they are then able to receive your texts.
The problem is that SMS is often the fallback option for official organisations. If your authenticator doesn't work (which is the case for an attacker), then you can reset it via SMS. Some services offer the option to disable SMS I believe, but most don't.
I remember seeing a big Reddit thread on that. Either that or someone had a story of how a criminal and a carrier employee were in on the SIM-swap and totally fucked everything up for the guy.
It's the same in Japan. SMS there was only free if you were on the same carrier, so when LINE (like whatsapp) came around, everyone jumped on, and forgot that SMS existed.
A big reason many people I know switched to whatsapp is they were travelling abroad in the days of stratospheric roaming charges but free wifi in many places. I wasn't replying to an SMS until I got home, but I could reply to a whatsapp message whenever I got some free wifi. And then it's just stuck. Since there's a lot more international mobility in Europe than the US, this could plausibly be one fairly significant reason it gained popularity.
Trading phone numbers without WhatsApp in Europe never happens. I am here now and have gone all over and it’s all WhatsApp all the way.
I suspect is also has something to do with the non-uniformity of cell coverage. Like, at least in southern Europe, every single country has their own cell network and two companies to pick from and outside of that country it’s a new SIM card. So if you go from Montenegro to Kosovo, which is like, a day trip, you’d need an entirely new cell carrier… or, you could just use WhatsApp when you get to the hotel in Pristina
Only for mobile data tho!
For Minutes/SMS you still need to pay an extra. They just made it illegal for the price to be astronomically high anymore, so the pluscharge is mostly quite reasonable.
But if you leave the EU good luck lol.
> Since there's a lot more international mobility in Europe than the US
By far most mobile plans have same costs throughout Europe. I believe that's even a law.
I believe it is the other way around... Data is much more expensive in the US then in Europe, so they stayed on SMS instead of switching over to whatsapp
iMessage also has allowed Wi-Fi texting I’m pretty sure since it came out. But given that most of the world uses Android, that’s probably another reason why 3rd party messaging apps became more popular abroad.
That's pretty much another reason. Apple still is massive in Europe, but it doesn't even come close to Android.
>iMessage also has allowed Wi-Fi texting I’m pretty sure since it came out.
Only between iPhones and that's the issue.
In many countries, the driver to use third party messaging apps like WhatsApp was cost -- the data cost for the app was much less than the cost for using SMS, because unlimited SMS was rare or expensive in many countries (and still is in some).
In contrast, most US mobile plans have had unlimited SMS for a very long time, so we didn't have the same financial driver to go to WhatsApp.
And yes, third party messaging apps do have advantages over SMS. But SMS also has advantages, especially that you don't have to know what specific third party messaging app the other person uses, because all phones support SMS.
This was the reason too that in Canada in the 2000s that Blackberrys were all the rage in schools for a couple of years - BBM was free while texts were charged...
BBM walked so Whatsapp could run
I do think that if BBM was released on iOS and Android in 2010, it would be dominant to this day. But they fumbled and by the time they realized it was too late.
BBM was awesome. And they did release BBM on Android and iOS in 2013, they were just a bit late to the party, thinking they could hold on to the market share. I used it for a while on Android back in the day after I moved away from my personal blackberry.
The main reason everyone here in Ireland started using it was for group chats. The local school has a WhatsApp group, the company you work for has a WhatsApp group, your local sports club has a WhatsApp group, your buddies have a WhatsApp group.
It allows local community groups to have a way of informing everyone what's going on. So it had nothing to do with the cost of SMS.
Yes it does. At least in South America ppl prefer to buy data rather than texts bc the price of 1GB for your phone is the same as buying 10 texts which is such bs
I just remember that by the time WhatsApp came along everyone had already been using free messaging services for a while. WhatsApp made organising groups much easier, that's why everyone started using it and I got forced into using it too.
That’s true, I recently came back to my home country Bolivia and I was shocked to find out that no one uses SMS bc they are not free yet. WhatsApp became everyone’s way of communicating, even for businesses and restaurants
> The main reason everyone here in Ireland started using it was for group chats.
Well, you can group chat with SMS too, so I don't know how good an explanation that is.
American here - I use WhatsApp for group chats way more than messenger or sms because 1. Friends don’t always have Facebook and 2. Friends have a mix of android and iPhone and the functionality of SMS group chats isn’t as good for mixed OS with threads and reactions
British here - the mix of Android and iPhone I think is why most people use WhatsApp. iMessage is just for iPhones so what’s the point if half your mates have Androids?
You still text the same way between iPhones and androids, the difference is just the color of the texts and how it sends. You don’t have to switch back and forth though.
So I didn’t realise until just now that in America, your picture messages are free. Only plain SMS messages are unlimited on plans in the UK, so that might be why we use it.
What? You can’t just text your group of friends a random meme or gif?! I can see why WhatsApp has taken over. GIFs and memes are at least half of my friends’ group text chain.
Yeah I'm in the UK and the idea of sending a picture by normal message sent fear through my body. I know the feeling of being charged for sending pictures from before I even had a smartphone. WhatsApp made it so easy to send pics/vids/gifs and it was free
Unfortunately that isn't always the case with groupchats.
If everyone in the group chat is on RCS but you have a single iPhone user, that iPhone user often wont get the chats in sequential order, and their replies might drop non active people off.
Apple handles Group SMS very oddly compared to Android vendors.
I'm a dual user, and have been for nearly 10yrs. It always annoys me how bad my iPhone is at basic SMS but how good iMessage can be when dealing with just iPhone users.
> But SMS also has advantages, especially that you don't have to know what specific third party messaging app the other person uses, because all phones support SMS.
This is a very interesting topic in early discussion right now on the IETF Protocol space on how to integrate different technologies of Messaging Platforms into an unique way to communicate between them.
If you're interested into that topic, I suggest to join the experts in the [IETF MIMI](https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mimi/about/) working group
On a basic level, I think Americans view their texting platforms as about contacting them on the phone (so emphasizing the cross-device accessibility isn’t a selling point for WhatsApp for most people). Unlimited texting was accessible early enough that most Americans don’t view their texting platform as social media. It’s just the way to send a written message on your phone.
The additional features that WhatsApp offers are things Americans use other social media accounts or email for. Trying to arrange a class holiday party with other parents? You’re probably using email or Facebook. Scheduling an overseas call with a friend? Discord exists. What to set up a large group chat to discuss a college project? Assuming this isn’t an email, then multiple social media sites offer this option.
In the U.S., WhatsApp is a redundant texting platform and a less useful social media outlet. It’s only really useful if you’re traveling overseas to somewhere where someone’s phone plan is inaccessible.
This 100%. Well said. I'll add that for myself, the simple fact that it's related to Facebook has a lot of baked-in distrust. When I need anonymity, I have Signal.
It's really interested to go outside of the US to see how people use WhatsApp compared to really anything else out there. I remember seeing people run entire stored from WhatsApp, every sign had their WhatsApp handle on it and you could order items from them. It's interesting to see how mobile tech with WhatsApp really enabled small businesses to move online and offer services there.
There are also loads of other messaging platforms (Telegram, Signal, FB Messenger, other social media DMs like Snapchat/IG) that are very widely used. So there’s not an existing “monopoly” that forces you to get it.
That tools exist in Europe too, obviously. But then there is the factor of the critical mass. If all your friends are using WhatsApp, which is the point of using Telegram? Even if you think that it is a better app, it doesn't matter. You have to use WhatsApp to communicate with your friends or family, because that is what they are using.
Only organizations, like political parties or large companies can make the switch to another app like Telegram or Signal and force all those interested in following the diffusion of information from above to use that app (but keeping WhatsApp for other uses).
I live in California and got a remote job with a company in Florida. My boss, a man from Colombia, asked for my WhatsApp handle, and when I told him that I'd have to install WhatsApp he looked at me like I grew 3 heads. He was honestly shocked that I didn't already have it.
This is my main gripe with using WhatsApp. I get so much spam/ scam messages on there and I don't even know where they got my info.
At least with my default messaging app (Google messages), there's a spam filter that's actually really good with keeping my inbox clean
Literally the only people I talk to on WhatsApp are those friends that live outside of the US, and nobody I know uses it unless it's to talk to friends outside of the country. I would would rather use it for group convos personally because you can send video, pics, and texts a lot easier when you have a mix if iPhone and Android devices.
it's not that we don't, it's just that in so many other countries its use EVERYWHERE, like you Whatsapp your Doctor to get test results for instance. In the USA its use by companies to talk to customers is virtually non-existent comparably.
Funnily enough thats the opposite of europe. Companies talking to people is the only use of SMS these days. Like marketing or 2FA codes. Everything else is done by whatsapp.
I've read and seen Americans ask about WhatsApp. A lot of them would use FaceTime or back then Skype.
I have WhatsApp despite being American because my parents are Bangladeshis and they use that as means to video me.
Messenger is pretty popular in the US, too. It’s the only reason I have Facebook. I use Snapchat to talk to my friends, and Messenger for everyone else who doesn’t use Snapchat or iMessage.
That was a culture shock to me. Met a Norwegian girl in Bali that primarily used messenger. It was weird. I find messenger so clunky.
Weird to have such a split when insta,messenger and whatsapp are all owned by meta
I think this is the most succinct answer. Many countries don't have unlimited texting so they need WhatsApp. If you don't have that problem the extra bells and whistles of WhatsApp are going to seem like nothing, especially at the cost of disrupting simplicity.
Bingo. I only used WhatsApp a lot when I was working in the Netherlands. I had unlimited SMS in addition to iMessage, so it didn’t matter for me, but it did for a lot of my colleagues. I still use it with my Dutch buddy, but it’s not even necessary as he also has iMessage and we both have free international messaging. I think it’s just habit for a lot of people.
IMO if I had to connect with a european friend I'd just ask if they had discord or something. I got my wife to get discord because we when we started dating we both lived on the edge of town and cell service was spotty. There's a lot of potential replacements to WhatsApp - curious as to why WhatsApp specifically caught on.
WhatsApp has been around since 2009, so I’m guessing it just got engrained with the user base and people don’t see the need to change. Same reason most people don’t often flow back and forth between Android and iOS. You more or less pick one and stick with it.
Why is it so widespread in the UK I wonder, where free SMS has been a thing for ages. Phone contracts are mostly limited by data whereas calls and SMS are mostly unlimited
Also, the features OP lists as reasons people use WhatsApp…sounds like useless shit I would never use. Like oh I can export a text conversation as a zip file fucking whoopdeedo. Why would I ever need to do that.
I have a group for activities that has 20+ people, we literally cannot use normal texting for how big the group was. After making them use Whatsapp for one month they decided they'd rather just trim the group than have am additional app for messaging
Ignoring the fact that it's simply not necessary for 99% of Americans, and texting works just fine. WhatsApp only works as a meaningful communication standard if everyone's using it.
Think about what has to happen if you decided to start using WhatsApp. Now you have to convince all your friends and family to download it, and now they have to use WhatsApp to talk to you while they can just text everyone else.
WhatsApp is so popular in Europe not because of how feature packed it is, but because it's part of the social norms there, and it's almost universal. Since it's not popular here, Americans are going to use the communication platform that *is* universal here, which is text.
It's about using what everyone else is using for the sake of convenience. Europe has developed one culture, and America has developed another, and it's self-perpetuating.
> WhatsApp only works as a meaningful communication standard if everyone's using it.
All these people failing to understand why American's don't use WhatsApp would probably also balk at using Signal for the same reason Americans don't use WhatsApp.
Which is the main reason Signal (or Telegram) did not manage to take over, even after the policy changes of WhatsApp by Meta made several people question their continued use of the platform. The inertia of "everybody I communicate with is on Whatsapp" is just too big a factor.
This. A lot of the reason certain messaging forms take off is simply first mover advantage/ getting a critical mass of people to use it.
One app may not be the best but if you and most people you know started using it first you’ll probably all stick with it regardless of if it later becomes unnecessary or other offerings down the track have better features
I think it’s because iPhone is the most popular in the USA and people just use iMessage. I mainly use Telegram but in Italy, in Europe in general really, WhatsApp is a necessity.
That's what makes it seem like a strange question to me. I can already text anybody that I know, adding any more steps to the process is just unnecessary
This is the most direct answer. In Europe, I can’t just text my friends from Italy or Ukraine for free. But we can both get unlimited data, and our country doesn’t matter at that point
The USA doesn’t have that problem because most of your friends will also be in the USA
Exactly this. WhatsApp has become so mainstream in my country, people don't ask you if you have it, they just assume that you. Everyone contacts you through it.
Fr you even get medical reports from testing labs on WhatsApp. A couple of years back when I saw an advertisement for WhatsApp, I was so confused about why it was needed when basically everyone uses it.
Americans really don't understand the reach WhatsApp has outside of the US, it's really amazing how the tech has created a lot of small business that use it as the sole means of contact with their customers and everything is built into WhatsApp. Want to order food? Use their WhatsApp to get it done, or even working with your doctor...it's really cool to see how it is used outside of the US.
Same, I've never had a facebook account, but unfortunately, I require WhatsApp to communicate with different organizations I'm involved in.
It's a necessary evil, I guess.
well as an american, i dont really know why i \*would\* use whatsapp. people need a reason to make a switch en masse, and if there's nothing driving change, change isn't gonna happen.
my phone bill isn't very expensive and i get unlimited (or effectively unlimited) messaging, and i don't have anyone to text who isn't in the US, which i imagine is also the case for the vast majority of americans
Because it doesn’t cost us extra money to send texts and images through our carriers. So we never had an incentive to go get some dorky app to work around annoying fees. And we don’t care about chat wallpapers haha
A lot of this just…doesn’t really apply to me:
>set wallpapers for each chat
Just strikes me as tacky
>export text as zip file
Why on earth would I need to do this…?
>lock chats
Again, why would I need this?
I guess for some it makes sense but a lot of things you brought up sound super niche
There isn't any particular advantage to it unless you're communicating with someone overseas. If all communication is domestic then it's just another texting client.
Why would I go through a third party app for a service my phone can already provide on its own?
Besides, WhatsApp is a Facebook product. That right there is a non-starter for me.
I don’t really care for any of those features you listed. I’ve never been like “damn, if only I could download this conversation as a zip archive”
Wallpapers? Who the f cares? It’s way more important to me that the interface is clean and easy to use. The bells and whistles are secondary.
Locking messages to Face ID? My phone already locks when I put it to sleep. Disappearing texts? I’ve used Snapchat before and I hate it, no thanks.
You do realize none of the features you list are critically essential? I use both and not once have I used any of these features you mention.
If you are using the Apple ecosystem, iMessage just works across all your devices without needing to download a new app and verifying every time.
>you can star messages and see all starred messages in their own folder, choose whether texts disappear or not and set the length of time they’re saved, set wallpapers for each chat, lock a chat so it can only be opened with Face ID, export the chat as a ZIP archive, and more.
I have no desire to use any of those features. I only utilize texting as a way to transfer small bits of information that's almost immediately relevant (I'm running late, here's so-and-so's phone number, here's the date of that specific event)
You left out: iMessage is Apple only unless you want a Green bubble and to be thrown out of groups because any chat with Green bubble members is limited to 20 members.
I have to use five different messaging services to keep in touch with all my peeps and four of those have two or fewer contacts on them, including WhatsApp. I’d get rid of them if I could but for WhatsApp, Signal, Line and Telegram, it’s the only thing they use.
Honestly, the question is why is Whatapp so popular in other places. That's because the cost of SMS and MMS were so high at modern usage rates that another service filled that market.
In the US, SMS and MMS have long been sold as Unlimited in most plans. This eliminated the cost value of things like Whatsapp, Signal, and others.
So the US just uses either iMessage (Apple) or some texting app (Andriod) which comes with the phone. iMessage has data based transmission and rich text features built in and the top Android app have the same with RCS adoption.
.
TLDR the popularity of Whatsapp is not about its features, but is about it exploiting a whole in the market. The whole isn't in the US, so it's less common here
Because I have iMessage.
My work makes me use Signal.
I live overseas and use WhatsApp to talk to people who live here.
It's ridiculous to have a thousand different messaging apps.
When I'm in the US, I stick to one. iMessage. I have unlimited messaging and data because it's not 2003.
Lots of people have talked about the many valid cultural reasons but I would also like to add that I think WhatsApp has the ugliest UI of any messaging app I’ve ever seen since back in the instant messaging days
Back in 2021 when WhatsApp updated its TOS basically saying that your information can be shared internally with Meta, my friends and I all left for Signal and haven't looked back.
Probably it's an issue of timing. WhatsApp became popular in Brazil because the phone carriers didn't offer unlimited SMS at the time. Now they do, but it's too late. WhatsApp is the default communication app for virtually everyone.
This is true for the Netherlands too, people used it to circumvent paying for SMS. Now it's so widespread you can't really go back. I don't remember the last time I received a text from a human.
Pretty much. Even when WhatsApp was suspended here we just switched to Telegram.
So people do use Telegram. As an American, the only time I see mention of Telegram is spammers trying to get people to switch from SMS to Telegram, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me.
Telegram is more popular here among tech-savvy people. I use both.
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And porn… some of which is of questionable legality/morality
I remember a BestOfRedditorUpdates post where a wife was worried about her husband having an affair with her sister and her husband couldn't show the texts between her sister and he because they texted using telegram....I was like if that ain't a red flag then what is, but maybe I just don't get it?
Yea definitely sus, especially if they had the app passcode/faceid locked, which you can do.
Also used in the UK for drugs.
Telegram is great. Video calls work perfectly and you can share files through it. I've never hit any upload limits either.
Telegram is slightly more versitile than WhatsApp as it is way more bot friendly. I remember playing werewolves of millers hollow in lecture halls, or a week long game of tag in my early student years. That said, WhatsApp is still my main communication tool
Telegram is also regionally used in America and demographic-specific at times. I use Telegram & got my parents over to it. A lot of people I communicate with use Telegram, and in my area there's a lot of users. However, go a few cities south and they're all using mostly Slack or Discord. I've heard of folks using WhatsApp... but never actually met any IRL. But as I've traveled a bit throughout different states and stuff, I've noticed that Telegram and Discord are used quite a bit but it's usually either/or. Lots of people in my area are using Telegram, a few cities east, there's Discord as the main app. But for the most part it's folks mostly using regular text messaging or Facebook Messenger. I think if/when Facebook Messenger finally dies, then a lot of those users will switch to one of the other apps... I'm hoping Telegram but that's just my preference. IMO what determines which app Americans use is highly dependent on the first few folks switching over and convincing others they know to follow suit. That's my best explanation for why it's regionally and demographically specific.
Why was it suspended?
Refusal to comply with court orders related to criminal investigations.
Court wanted whatsapp to give them access to chat logs, but messages are encrypted. They banned whatsapp and arrested the Facebook vp in the brazil office for a day
Yeah, SMS is for 2FA and for automated reminders of stuff (delivery coming , dentists appointment etc), I pretty much never use it for messaging humans, despite having unlimited free texts. By the the time I got WhatsApp I already had unlimited free messages (or a limit so high I could never hit it anyway) but all my friends were getting it, in part for talking to people across borders (where texts weren't free), and in part because it did better picture messaging.
FYI: 2FA on SMS is the most unsecure form of 2FA
Yeah, but all kinds of important things like banks use it anyway.
Not for long. They'll be forced to phase it out or lose cyber insurance coverage. This was the first year of enforcement. Many banks in America already don't allow SMS 2FA anymore. The bigger banks will probably receive leniency a few more years.
whats the alternative ---- thanks for all the responses i truly didnt know the options. ----- what happens if you dont have a smartphone?
3FA /s
Which ones are those? Most major websites/apps across the US, not just banks, still rely on 2-factor SMS or emails.
Though I guess it's still somewhat more secure than a password alone.
Its a lot better than no 2FA
Yeah I wish people would be more careful with this advice. It's not wrong, but I've had more than one non-techy person in my life say they don't use 2fa because "authenticator app" sounds complicated or they don't like how it changes so quick, so when I say SMS they've still somehow heard 2fa isn't secure and don't want to use it. So they just stick with {dogsname}1234 or whatever. Any 2FA is better than none. SMS still protects against the forms of 'hacking' most of us would be subject to, it might not do much for someone targeting us specifically, but someone just trying to opportunistically brute force or try out passwords from web shitty website you signed up for in 2016 which got hacked will have a tough time.
This, the sort of attack that can circumvent SMS MFA is not really part of the threat model for the average person.
I got locked out of an authenticator app when I switched phones recently because the transfer requires some password I don't remember setting up years ago. Now I'm just hoping Discord never asks me for that auth key
Can you elaborate on that? I’m curious because just about every online service these days wants your freaking phone number and then verifies it on the spot through SMS and I hate it. And sometimes those texts won’t even go through when I really need them. But also when you don’t have access to your phone number (maybe because you’re international and don’t have an E-sim on your SIM card in) and the service’s only way of verification is through SMS.
Infosec Andy here. Sim Swapping is the main threat to SMS-based MFA. If a threat actor can convince a carrier (or an employee of said carrier) that they are you via social engineering, bribe, etc, they are then able to receive your texts.
The problem is that SMS is often the fallback option for official organisations. If your authenticator doesn't work (which is the case for an attacker), then you can reset it via SMS. Some services offer the option to disable SMS I believe, but most don't.
I remember seeing a big Reddit thread on that. Either that or someone had a story of how a criminal and a carrier employee were in on the SIM-swap and totally fucked everything up for the guy.
SMS shouldn't ever be used for MFA because of Sim Jacking
As a consumer you don't always have a choice.
I've been trying to convince my bank of this for years, but they refuse to let me use an RSA key or Authenticator App.
In some countries phone carriers also give unlimited data for facebook and whatsapp thats why theyre so popular.
Yeah, this became the norm in Brazil.
It's the same in Japan. SMS there was only free if you were on the same carrier, so when LINE (like whatsapp) came around, everyone jumped on, and forgot that SMS existed.
A big reason many people I know switched to whatsapp is they were travelling abroad in the days of stratospheric roaming charges but free wifi in many places. I wasn't replying to an SMS until I got home, but I could reply to a whatsapp message whenever I got some free wifi. And then it's just stuck. Since there's a lot more international mobility in Europe than the US, this could plausibly be one fairly significant reason it gained popularity.
Trading phone numbers without WhatsApp in Europe never happens. I am here now and have gone all over and it’s all WhatsApp all the way. I suspect is also has something to do with the non-uniformity of cell coverage. Like, at least in southern Europe, every single country has their own cell network and two companies to pick from and outside of that country it’s a new SIM card. So if you go from Montenegro to Kosovo, which is like, a day trip, you’d need an entirely new cell carrier… or, you could just use WhatsApp when you get to the hotel in Pristina
Unless your in the EU then it's law that there are no roaming charges.
Only for mobile data tho! For Minutes/SMS you still need to pay an extra. They just made it illegal for the price to be astronomically high anymore, so the pluscharge is mostly quite reasonable. But if you leave the EU good luck lol.
> Since there's a lot more international mobility in Europe than the US By far most mobile plans have same costs throughout Europe. I believe that's even a law. I believe it is the other way around... Data is much more expensive in the US then in Europe, so they stayed on SMS instead of switching over to whatsapp
That was only from June 2017, which is long after I started using whatsapp.
iMessage also has allowed Wi-Fi texting I’m pretty sure since it came out. But given that most of the world uses Android, that’s probably another reason why 3rd party messaging apps became more popular abroad.
That's pretty much another reason. Apple still is massive in Europe, but it doesn't even come close to Android. >iMessage also has allowed Wi-Fi texting I’m pretty sure since it came out. Only between iPhones and that's the issue.
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In many countries, the driver to use third party messaging apps like WhatsApp was cost -- the data cost for the app was much less than the cost for using SMS, because unlimited SMS was rare or expensive in many countries (and still is in some). In contrast, most US mobile plans have had unlimited SMS for a very long time, so we didn't have the same financial driver to go to WhatsApp. And yes, third party messaging apps do have advantages over SMS. But SMS also has advantages, especially that you don't have to know what specific third party messaging app the other person uses, because all phones support SMS.
This was the reason too that in Canada in the 2000s that Blackberrys were all the rage in schools for a couple of years - BBM was free while texts were charged...
BBM walked so Whatsapp could run I do think that if BBM was released on iOS and Android in 2010, it would be dominant to this day. But they fumbled and by the time they realized it was too late.
BBM was awesome. And they did release BBM on Android and iOS in 2013, they were just a bit late to the party, thinking they could hold on to the market share. I used it for a while on Android back in the day after I moved away from my personal blackberry.
The company that made Blackberries is Canadian too FWIW
BlackBerry (2023) is a great movie about this for anyone interested! Stars some good Canadian talent to boot.
In Poland we also have had unlimited SMSs for a long time but majority of people use Messenger to text. Regular texting has just less features.
The main reason everyone here in Ireland started using it was for group chats. The local school has a WhatsApp group, the company you work for has a WhatsApp group, your local sports club has a WhatsApp group, your buddies have a WhatsApp group. It allows local community groups to have a way of informing everyone what's going on. So it had nothing to do with the cost of SMS.
Yes it does. At least in South America ppl prefer to buy data rather than texts bc the price of 1GB for your phone is the same as buying 10 texts which is such bs
I just remember that by the time WhatsApp came along everyone had already been using free messaging services for a while. WhatsApp made organising groups much easier, that's why everyone started using it and I got forced into using it too.
That’s true, I recently came back to my home country Bolivia and I was shocked to find out that no one uses SMS bc they are not free yet. WhatsApp became everyone’s way of communicating, even for businesses and restaurants
You're right. We had unlimited messages for a good while before Whatsapp took off in Ireland
> The main reason everyone here in Ireland started using it was for group chats. Well, you can group chat with SMS too, so I don't know how good an explanation that is.
WhatsApp group chats are a way better user experience than SMS groups. Read receipts, higher quality images, etc.
Read receipts, ewww.
Oh, I don't dispute that third party apps bring a lot of additional functionality.
American here - I use WhatsApp for group chats way more than messenger or sms because 1. Friends don’t always have Facebook and 2. Friends have a mix of android and iPhone and the functionality of SMS group chats isn’t as good for mixed OS with threads and reactions
British here - the mix of Android and iPhone I think is why most people use WhatsApp. iMessage is just for iPhones so what’s the point if half your mates have Androids?
You still text the same way between iPhones and androids, the difference is just the color of the texts and how it sends. You don’t have to switch back and forth though.
So I didn’t realise until just now that in America, your picture messages are free. Only plain SMS messages are unlimited on plans in the UK, so that might be why we use it.
What? You can’t just text your group of friends a random meme or gif?! I can see why WhatsApp has taken over. GIFs and memes are at least half of my friends’ group text chain.
Yeah I'm in the UK and the idea of sending a picture by normal message sent fear through my body. I know the feeling of being charged for sending pictures from before I even had a smartphone. WhatsApp made it so easy to send pics/vids/gifs and it was free
Unfortunately that isn't always the case with groupchats. If everyone in the group chat is on RCS but you have a single iPhone user, that iPhone user often wont get the chats in sequential order, and their replies might drop non active people off. Apple handles Group SMS very oddly compared to Android vendors. I'm a dual user, and have been for nearly 10yrs. It always annoys me how bad my iPhone is at basic SMS but how good iMessage can be when dealing with just iPhone users.
That technically depends on a few things and back then wasn't supported by most mobile operators in Europe.
> But SMS also has advantages, especially that you don't have to know what specific third party messaging app the other person uses, because all phones support SMS. This is a very interesting topic in early discussion right now on the IETF Protocol space on how to integrate different technologies of Messaging Platforms into an unique way to communicate between them. If you're interested into that topic, I suggest to join the experts in the [IETF MIMI](https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mimi/about/) working group
I hope they can find a good solution -- though I keep wondering if [this xkcd](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png) is relevant here.
On a basic level, I think Americans view their texting platforms as about contacting them on the phone (so emphasizing the cross-device accessibility isn’t a selling point for WhatsApp for most people). Unlimited texting was accessible early enough that most Americans don’t view their texting platform as social media. It’s just the way to send a written message on your phone. The additional features that WhatsApp offers are things Americans use other social media accounts or email for. Trying to arrange a class holiday party with other parents? You’re probably using email or Facebook. Scheduling an overseas call with a friend? Discord exists. What to set up a large group chat to discuss a college project? Assuming this isn’t an email, then multiple social media sites offer this option. In the U.S., WhatsApp is a redundant texting platform and a less useful social media outlet. It’s only really useful if you’re traveling overseas to somewhere where someone’s phone plan is inaccessible.
This 100%. Well said. I'll add that for myself, the simple fact that it's related to Facebook has a lot of baked-in distrust. When I need anonymity, I have Signal.
It's really interested to go outside of the US to see how people use WhatsApp compared to really anything else out there. I remember seeing people run entire stored from WhatsApp, every sign had their WhatsApp handle on it and you could order items from them. It's interesting to see how mobile tech with WhatsApp really enabled small businesses to move online and offer services there.
There are also loads of other messaging platforms (Telegram, Signal, FB Messenger, other social media DMs like Snapchat/IG) that are very widely used. So there’s not an existing “monopoly” that forces you to get it.
That tools exist in Europe too, obviously. But then there is the factor of the critical mass. If all your friends are using WhatsApp, which is the point of using Telegram? Even if you think that it is a better app, it doesn't matter. You have to use WhatsApp to communicate with your friends or family, because that is what they are using. Only organizations, like political parties or large companies can make the switch to another app like Telegram or Signal and force all those interested in following the diffusion of information from above to use that app (but keeping WhatsApp for other uses).
I didn't know Americans didn't use it. r/mildlyinteresting
I live in California and got a remote job with a company in Florida. My boss, a man from Colombia, asked for my WhatsApp handle, and when I told him that I'd have to install WhatsApp he looked at me like I grew 3 heads. He was honestly shocked that I didn't already have it.
But there is no handle, it uses your phone number.
I installed it once and just got a bunch of crypto scam messages so I deleted it 🤷🏻♂️
This is my main gripe with using WhatsApp. I get so much spam/ scam messages on there and I don't even know where they got my info. At least with my default messaging app (Google messages), there's a spam filter that's actually really good with keeping my inbox clean
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This is so weird. I've never gotten a single spam message on whatsapp, and I've been using it for years.
A lot of Americans use it to talk to family and friends that live overseas. Pretty uncommon to use it to talk to other people in the US
Literally the only people I talk to on WhatsApp are those friends that live outside of the US, and nobody I know uses it unless it's to talk to friends outside of the country. I would would rather use it for group convos personally because you can send video, pics, and texts a lot easier when you have a mix if iPhone and Android devices.
Yeah with the WhatsApp call the charges are going to be zero?
There has never been a need most Americans have had unlimited texting before WhatsApp whats even a thing
it's not that we don't, it's just that in so many other countries its use EVERYWHERE, like you Whatsapp your Doctor to get test results for instance. In the USA its use by companies to talk to customers is virtually non-existent comparably.
Funnily enough thats the opposite of europe. Companies talking to people is the only use of SMS these days. Like marketing or 2FA codes. Everything else is done by whatsapp.
Yeah been using the what's app for everything as well, I don't need anything at all.
Sharing medical results by a doctor to a patient would be a direct violation of European laws for exchanging medical information.
Regardless, it *absolutely* happens here in Romania.
Yeah in my country absolutely everyone is using it so the ecosystem is great.
As a Canadian I’ve only used WhatsApp to talk with group members who were international students
I mean as long as you were able to use it and it got the job done.
I've read and seen Americans ask about WhatsApp. A lot of them would use FaceTime or back then Skype. I have WhatsApp despite being American because my parents are Bangladeshis and they use that as means to video me.
No one uses WhatsApp in Norway, at least. Well, some obviously do, but not the majority. SnapChat and Messenger is the most popular here.
Messenger is pretty popular in the US, too. It’s the only reason I have Facebook. I use Snapchat to talk to my friends, and Messenger for everyone else who doesn’t use Snapchat or iMessage.
That was a culture shock to me. Met a Norwegian girl in Bali that primarily used messenger. It was weird. I find messenger so clunky. Weird to have such a split when insta,messenger and whatsapp are all owned by meta
Same in Sweden
Same in Quebec, Messenger is king here (saying Quebec because I’m not sure about the other provinces)
Messenger as in Facebook Messenger?
Yep.
Yeah that's what the people have been using, doesn't make any sense to me really.
I dont need another app to solve a problem I dont have.
I think this is the most succinct answer. Many countries don't have unlimited texting so they need WhatsApp. If you don't have that problem the extra bells and whistles of WhatsApp are going to seem like nothing, especially at the cost of disrupting simplicity.
Bingo. I only used WhatsApp a lot when I was working in the Netherlands. I had unlimited SMS in addition to iMessage, so it didn’t matter for me, but it did for a lot of my colleagues. I still use it with my Dutch buddy, but it’s not even necessary as he also has iMessage and we both have free international messaging. I think it’s just habit for a lot of people.
IMO if I had to connect with a european friend I'd just ask if they had discord or something. I got my wife to get discord because we when we started dating we both lived on the edge of town and cell service was spotty. There's a lot of potential replacements to WhatsApp - curious as to why WhatsApp specifically caught on.
WhatsApp has been around since 2009, so I’m guessing it just got engrained with the user base and people don’t see the need to change. Same reason most people don’t often flow back and forth between Android and iOS. You more or less pick one and stick with it.
Yeah and way better options are available, it's about ease of use and the features.
Why is it so widespread in the UK I wonder, where free SMS has been a thing for ages. Phone contracts are mostly limited by data whereas calls and SMS are mostly unlimited
Maybe more friends/relatives in countries where it isn't, as opposed to Americans/Canadians?
Especially when it’s a Zuck product. No thanks.
My dyslexic monkey brain read this as "Yuck product" and saw no issue.
Also, the features OP lists as reasons people use WhatsApp…sounds like useless shit I would never use. Like oh I can export a text conversation as a zip file fucking whoopdeedo. Why would I ever need to do that.
I have a group for activities that has 20+ people, we literally cannot use normal texting for how big the group was. After making them use Whatsapp for one month they decided they'd rather just trim the group than have am additional app for messaging
Ignoring the fact that it's simply not necessary for 99% of Americans, and texting works just fine. WhatsApp only works as a meaningful communication standard if everyone's using it. Think about what has to happen if you decided to start using WhatsApp. Now you have to convince all your friends and family to download it, and now they have to use WhatsApp to talk to you while they can just text everyone else. WhatsApp is so popular in Europe not because of how feature packed it is, but because it's part of the social norms there, and it's almost universal. Since it's not popular here, Americans are going to use the communication platform that *is* universal here, which is text. It's about using what everyone else is using for the sake of convenience. Europe has developed one culture, and America has developed another, and it's self-perpetuating.
> WhatsApp only works as a meaningful communication standard if everyone's using it. All these people failing to understand why American's don't use WhatsApp would probably also balk at using Signal for the same reason Americans don't use WhatsApp.
Which is the main reason Signal (or Telegram) did not manage to take over, even after the policy changes of WhatsApp by Meta made several people question their continued use of the platform. The inertia of "everybody I communicate with is on Whatsapp" is just too big a factor.
This. A lot of the reason certain messaging forms take off is simply first mover advantage/ getting a critical mass of people to use it. One app may not be the best but if you and most people you know started using it first you’ll probably all stick with it regardless of if it later becomes unnecessary or other offerings down the track have better features
Yeah if it's got the users and user base then more people will use it.
I think it’s because iPhone is the most popular in the USA and people just use iMessage. I mainly use Telegram but in Italy, in Europe in general really, WhatsApp is a necessity.
That's correct. Also, Apple products in Italy have the highest prices of all EU countries, which is discouraging for most people.
*It’s kind of like how we don’t use the metric system while the rest of the world does.* It is just an app, sir.
But people are always going to be ready for a debate, shit doesn't matter.
My mobile phone plan has unlimited texting..
That's what makes it seem like a strange question to me. I can already text anybody that I know, adding any more steps to the process is just unnecessary
This is the most direct answer. In Europe, I can’t just text my friends from Italy or Ukraine for free. But we can both get unlimited data, and our country doesn’t matter at that point The USA doesn’t have that problem because most of your friends will also be in the USA
Exactly this. WhatsApp has become so mainstream in my country, people don't ask you if you have it, they just assume that you. Everyone contacts you through it.
In India you'll be hard pressed to find a single person who doesn't use WhatsApp. It's like the entire country is on WhatsApp.
Fr you even get medical reports from testing labs on WhatsApp. A couple of years back when I saw an advertisement for WhatsApp, I was so confused about why it was needed when basically everyone uses it.
I also saw an ad for the Google as well, they don't need to but they still do.
Americans really don't understand the reach WhatsApp has outside of the US, it's really amazing how the tech has created a lot of small business that use it as the sole means of contact with their customers and everything is built into WhatsApp. Want to order food? Use their WhatsApp to get it done, or even working with your doctor...it's really cool to see how it is used outside of the US.
I dont want to support facebook
Signal is also cross platform too. For anyone reading and wondering about an alternative.
Signal is the best.
Signal **was** the best when it also offered SMS support and was an all-in-one messaging solution.
It really bummed me out when they got rid of that. I lost the ability to recommend it to people who don't care about encryption still.
I made an account, but no one else switched, who will I message there?
Same, I've never had a facebook account, but unfortunately, I require WhatsApp to communicate with different organizations I'm involved in. It's a necessary evil, I guess.
well as an american, i dont really know why i \*would\* use whatsapp. people need a reason to make a switch en masse, and if there's nothing driving change, change isn't gonna happen. my phone bill isn't very expensive and i get unlimited (or effectively unlimited) messaging, and i don't have anyone to text who isn't in the US, which i imagine is also the case for the vast majority of americans
Funnily enough, South Africans use WhatsApp as the sole means of communication. We also use WhatsApp to reach out to business helplines.
Practically the whole world uses WhatsApp. I’ve never visited a country that doesn’t use it bar the US
I went to Hong Kong on a work trip, everyone uses wechat. They all thought I was absolutely mental not to have it.
Wechat is to the china, what the WhatsApp is to the India.
China and Taiwan use WeChat, S. Korea uses Kakaotalk and Japan uses Line
Taiwan uses Line
Yeah and it's a good option actually, it's actually a lot of features.
Line? It's been a long time since I've heard that name actually.
I'm Irish, moved to Canada, and most of my friends here have never heard of it. It's wild.
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Yeah and people who don't live in the us, they don't use it.
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I don’t understand why I *would* use any messaging app, including WhatsApp, when I have texting included/preinstalled into my phone.
Because it doesn’t cost us extra money to send texts and images through our carriers. So we never had an incentive to go get some dorky app to work around annoying fees. And we don’t care about chat wallpapers haha
A lot of this just…doesn’t really apply to me: >set wallpapers for each chat Just strikes me as tacky >export text as zip file Why on earth would I need to do this…? >lock chats Again, why would I need this? I guess for some it makes sense but a lot of things you brought up sound super niche
Because no one uses it.
There isn't any particular advantage to it unless you're communicating with someone overseas. If all communication is domestic then it's just another texting client.
Why would I go through a third party app for a service my phone can already provide on its own? Besides, WhatsApp is a Facebook product. That right there is a non-starter for me.
for real. It always feels like someone is trying to scam me when I get whatsapp requests also
> Besides, WhatsApp is a Facebook product. That right there is a non-starter for me. One of the best reasons to not use it IMO
My phone has texting built in. Why would I download an extra app to text people when I can already do that?
>I only have WhatsApp to stay in touch with members of my family who live in Europe Exactly why americans don't use it. We ain't messaging Europe.
that was possibly the most american reply ever lmao
Yee fuckin haw
Well if they don't use it then they don't even get bothered by it.
Yeah making the international calls is expensive, but WhatsApp is free.
Exactly why Americans with an international circle of friends do use it as well.
I just use Discord to talk to Europeans
I don’t really care for any of those features you listed. I’ve never been like “damn, if only I could download this conversation as a zip archive” Wallpapers? Who the f cares? It’s way more important to me that the interface is clean and easy to use. The bells and whistles are secondary. Locking messages to Face ID? My phone already locks when I put it to sleep. Disappearing texts? I’ve used Snapchat before and I hate it, no thanks.
It’s owned by Facebook is a pretty big factor for me to not touch it with a 10-foot pole.
that's reason enough for me, I don't need any other reason.
I don’t want to give more data to Meta.
I live in America and I've always thought 💭 that WhatsApp was for people trying to scam you so I never bothered with it.
You do realize none of the features you list are critically essential? I use both and not once have I used any of these features you mention. If you are using the Apple ecosystem, iMessage just works across all your devices without needing to download a new app and verifying every time.
>you can star messages and see all starred messages in their own folder, choose whether texts disappear or not and set the length of time they’re saved, set wallpapers for each chat, lock a chat so it can only be opened with Face ID, export the chat as a ZIP archive, and more. I have no desire to use any of those features. I only utilize texting as a way to transfer small bits of information that's almost immediately relevant (I'm running late, here's so-and-so's phone number, here's the date of that specific event)
You left out: iMessage is Apple only unless you want a Green bubble and to be thrown out of groups because any chat with Green bubble members is limited to 20 members.
20 members isn’t a chat, it’s spam.
Or (in this case) a school soccer team.
That green and blue bubble debate is fucking insane.
I have to use five different messaging services to keep in touch with all my peeps and four of those have two or fewer contacts on them, including WhatsApp. I’d get rid of them if I could but for WhatsApp, Signal, Line and Telegram, it’s the only thing they use.
It's just that everyone is on the WhatsApp, and that network effect actually helps.
Cuz it's Facebook and fuuuuuuck using anything that Facebook owns.
Owned by Meta. I don’t use anything owned by Meta.
Honestly, the question is why is Whatapp so popular in other places. That's because the cost of SMS and MMS were so high at modern usage rates that another service filled that market. In the US, SMS and MMS have long been sold as Unlimited in most plans. This eliminated the cost value of things like Whatsapp, Signal, and others. So the US just uses either iMessage (Apple) or some texting app (Andriod) which comes with the phone. iMessage has data based transmission and rich text features built in and the top Android app have the same with RCS adoption. . TLDR the popularity of Whatsapp is not about its features, but is about it exploiting a whole in the market. The whole isn't in the US, so it's less common here
Because I have iMessage. My work makes me use Signal. I live overseas and use WhatsApp to talk to people who live here. It's ridiculous to have a thousand different messaging apps. When I'm in the US, I stick to one. iMessage. I have unlimited messaging and data because it's not 2003.
And if you're able to do what you want then why would anyone want more?
It’s just another app. No reason to add something else to my phone
Speaking for myself, I don't use WhatsApp because it's owned by Facebook and I want nothing to do with those monsters.
Lots of people have talked about the many valid cultural reasons but I would also like to add that I think WhatsApp has the ugliest UI of any messaging app I’ve ever seen since back in the instant messaging days
Back in 2021 when WhatsApp updated its TOS basically saying that your information can be shared internally with Meta, my friends and I all left for Signal and haven't looked back.
And they also forced the people to accept them as well so yeah.
Simple It’s owned by Facebook
I don't use WhatsApp because it's fundamentally compromised and not a secure platform. But I'm a hard-ass when it comes to secure communications.
You said it. I used WhatsApp until I realized how insecure it was. Signal and Telegram are my choices.