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?
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?
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 :)
People who care about you might switch to signal.
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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.
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Sms is actually outdated and apple is stubborn in it Usa should had migrated to a privacy friendly alternative like signal or Matrix
The 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)/¯
Well not so much huge parts of the world where iMessage isn’t used
Right, but we’re talking about the popularity of text messages in the (U)States(A). And usually we don’t call average Joe to someone out of the States ;)
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That’s obviously true worldwide, but nobody uses the default messaging apps outside the states. So I’m not sure what your comment is meant to illustrate.
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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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?