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It's highly regional, so if you live in e.g. America where iMessage is dominant then you wouldn't. But WhatsApp is the dominant messaging platform in most of the world. E.g. in the UK it has basically 100% market share.
What surprises me is that while WhatsApp has become an "everything" app in many parts of the world, much like WeChat in China, it has not done so in the US. In fact, I don't know anyone in the US who uses WhatsApp "internally" (the only times I use it is to communicate with people outside the US). The description of WhatsApp here is exactly what Elon wanted X to become (which clearly didn't and almost certainly now w…
But banking, social media, ID/login, maps, albums, browsing etc I all do outside of whatsapp.
What surprises me is that while WhatsApp has become an "everything" app in many parts of the world, much like WeChat in China, it has not done so in the US. In fact, I don't know anyone in the US who uses WhatsApp "internally" (the only times I use it is to communicate with people outside the US). The description of WhatsApp here is exactly what Elon wanted X to become (which clearly didn't and almost certainly now w…
A friend asked me to use it first. She's not a techie, but she wasn't earning much and my first instinct was a mild annoyance that she was being cheap and trying to get me to use this other weird thing. What I had "worked" and had everyone on it. But ok, I'll try it. Became an early-ish adopter, spoke with her and a few people, over time it grew and utterly replaced texts. For friends, work, groups. If you try texting there, you're a dinosaur. We had no sense of social stigma of blue/green ticks. Everyone had the same ticks.
Moved to Australia and now I have to check. It's mostly WhatsApp but still some texts, and I have to check if someone is on WhatsApp rather than assume. Once or twice I've had to send on both channels. But there are WhatsApp groups everywhere, so no idea why this texting thing is still alive.
Notice and compare your own instincts when you read this. You might have the opposite reaction depending on where you are.
And for startups, it's whether you can land and enable a benefit before the existing company builds it. Speed vs distribution. Texting was so big a source of revenue that the local network providers kept the price high and basically lost it all. They could have dropped the price to where network effects prevented movement. The comfort of having the buttons and features and network where you expect them is massive.
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Payments. The sticky part of "everything" app is the payments platform. With a payments platform you have a internal "funded" ecosystem. Anybody who can not take payments from the "everything" app has a incentive to get inside so they can get paid. In many countries, the "everything" app contains, what in the US would be called, a bank. This is basically illegal in the USA. US Banks are extremely stringently regulate…
Nope - nobody in Europe uses WhatsApp as a payments platform. Does it even have one? It succeeded because it was around at the time where SMS messages where expensive, but smart phones where exploding in popularity.
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Hi, I am one of the editors of this story, and we have also thought about this. In my opinion, one of the reasons why WhatsApp hasn't become the "everything app" in the US is because Apple/iOS devices are very popular in the country, where as in much of the world, Android is popular thanks to the availability of cheaper devices. Apple offers a suit of apps and features, including Facetime, that's not available for An…
It’s pretty simple: SMS functionality sucked and was super expensive. Before WhatsApp there was blackberry messenger (BBM). When I was growing up kids were running around with blackberry phones, marketed at businessmen, purely for BBM. WhatsApp was just this, except on a platform that didn’t suck. WhatsApp also predates iMessage and FaceTime.
I was surprised to find this accurate. Though the lineage for a Mac user would likely include Messages and iChat, which go back further.
iChat: 2002 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IChat Messages: 2007 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messages_(Apple) iMessage: 2011 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMessage WhatsApp: 2009 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp
Whatsapp is such a big cultural force that many of my non technical friends and family members refuse to use anything else. No mail for full res photos is one thing, but you can't make them use anything else. Everything lives in Whatsapp. Todos, notes, reminders, sharing stuff (airdrop is the only exception if everyone involved has iOS). It is less because of whatsapp features (Nobody uses any features like payments)…
I didn’t even know it could do things other than send messages. How do they do all that other stuff? Bots? Plain text chats?
The above are just two examples but people really do almost everything within Whatsapp without using any special features.
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The question is where you live where this is not the case. You're the outlier here.
I think it's not as prominent as this in the US - probably because the equivalent is Apple messaging systems, if your family / friend group is all in that?
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I'm reasonably confident WhatsApp never caught on in the USA because most American phone plans had unlimited SMS in the early 2010s when WhatsApp's popularity was growing elsewhere. International messaging was probably also a big driver in Europe, but less relevant in other markets.
International messaging is still relevant in many parts of the world that don't necessarily need to message neighboring countries, but have a big diaspora.
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WhatsApp is not a "everything" platform in most of Europe. Do you open WhatsApp to play music, games, order takeout, order online, pay for rent? It is just a very popular chat application in most of Europe in contrast to a "everything" app like WeChat where you do all of those things. [1] https://www.whatsapp.com/payments/in
Nope, but by that definition almost no countries have an “everything app”. There’s like, one example in a very unique market? It’s the “everything app” for messaging, friends and groups.
- Booking trains on the national railway
- Booking flights
- Booking hotels
- Paying all your bills
- Buying stuff
- Ordering food
- Renting a bike
- Getting a rideshare
- Seeing a doctor
- Donating to charities
- Investing
- Reading e-books
- Pretty much everything else
A lot of it is done through their HTML5 "mini-app" ecosystem but it's all under one everything app.