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How WhatsApp became an unstoppable global cultural force

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Re: How WhatsApp became an unstoppable global cultural force

#151

Post by immibis »

jorvi wrote: post #129
itikasp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

WhatsApp has not become the "everything app" in the EU either? People use it for chatting with people, groups of people, or businesses. Virtually no one uses the Status or Communities feature. I have 289 people in my phone book right now, 1 of them occasionally posts on Status when on vacation. Of 25 people I quickly checked with, not one of them uses Communities.

This. It's just a replacement SMS and phone app. It's not an everything app.

Re: How WhatsApp became an unstoppable global cultural force

#152

Post by vladvasiliu »

kazen44 wrote: post #84
Zak wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yes, roaming coasts where still a thing inside the EU, so messaging relatives or friends while on holiday sucked because of the enormous pricing for roaming. (even while using SMS!. I remember paying rougly 30 euros to send a couple of hundred text messages and have a couple of minutes ( like half an hour or something) while on holiday in france. thankfully, roaming got abolished in the first half of the 2010's thank…

Roaming is abolished but not international fees.

This means we now have this funny situation where if you’re abroad, sending international texts or calls is included in your plan. But if you’re in your own country, calling or texting someone in a different country is not.

Re: How WhatsApp became an unstoppable global cultural force

#153

Post by immibis »

Veserv wrote: post #18
insane_dreamer wrote: post #8

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…

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…

Meanwhile no-KYC cryptocurrency exchange sites are mostly hosted by or proxied through Cloudflare, a US company.

Re: How WhatsApp became an unstoppable global cultural force

#154

Post by immibis »

dheera wrote: post #46
insane_dreamer wrote: post #8

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…

For one, in other countries, people are perfectly okay with doing real business over a messaging app. I saw a doctor in Indonesia once and everything from appointment scheduling to follow up with the doctor was done on WhatsApp. They were okay sending medical tests, records, and bills on WhatsApp as well. In China, same thing, on WeChat. In the US, they want you to register some stupid MyHealth thing, sign some paper…

What is a collectivist country?

Re: How WhatsApp became an unstoppable global cultural force

#155

Post by notyourwork »

marc_abonce wrote: post #147

Another reason that the article and other comments here are missing is the zero-rating deals that WhatsApp has with virtually all mobile providers, at least in Mexico. Your phone's plan will cover calls and an internet connection up to a certain data cap, but WhatsApp's data usage is uncapped. So, if you want to chat with a less mainstream app you'd end up paying more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-rating

Which is ridiculous! The internet shouldn’t be able to give preference to some services over others. Bandwidth should be neutral.

Re: How WhatsApp became an unstoppable global cultural force

#156

Post by hocuspocus »

Zak wrote: post #149
hocuspocus wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But realistically I don't know why any carrier would give a damn about this. In 2013, SMS was already irrelevant in most of the world. And in the US pretty much everyone had had unlimited texting for a while. Encouraging people towards OTT messaging was beneficial to carriers that were now ubiquitously making money on data packages, not texts/calls.

End users are not the only customers for SMS. A large number of automated notifications, confirmations, and 2FA codes are sent that way, and carriers get paid for it.

And how is this relevant to Hangouts acting as the default SMS client for a minority of subscribers?

Re: How WhatsApp became an unstoppable global cultural force

#157

Post by Zak »

hocuspocus wrote: post #90
Zak wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hangouts was the default SMS client in Android for a while, and it worked well enough as an SMS client that I never heard anybody complain about it. Much like iMessage, it could upgrade to internet-based messaging if both people in a conversation used it. Where Google went wrong was bowing to pressure from carriers to stop doing that. Carriers had been much more powerful in the past, and I think Google failed to reco…

I don't buy it. Google just followed iMessage, only two years later, I don't see why carriers would suddenly have an issue with that. Plus Hangouts has never been a mainstream mobile messaging app, and I was a big user at the time. I worked at Samsung then and I'd bet most Android users never launched Hangouts nor even noticed it was preinstalled. Google killed the integration in 2017 when they started betting on RCS…

Did Samsung use a different SMS client by default? I had Nexus and Xperia devices at the time, and they defaulted to Hangouts. If Samsung didn't use it, that approach might not have had much chance of reaching critical mass.

Re: How WhatsApp became an unstoppable global cultural force

#158

Post by Zak »

hocuspocus wrote: post #156
Zak wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

End users are not the only customers for SMS. A large number of automated notifications, confirmations, and 2FA codes are sent that way, and carriers get paid for it.

And how is this relevant to Hangouts acting as the default SMS client for a minority of subscribers?

If it was nearly every Android device, it wouldn't have been a minority in the mid 2010s.

I don't have an authoritative citation, but complaints from carriers is often reported as the reason Google backed away from the default SMS client decision. Here's one example, but I've seen it from other publications: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/rip-google-hangouts-...

Re: How WhatsApp became an unstoppable global cultural force

#159

Post by zanderwohl »

e1g wrote: post #51
IshKebab wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And by “America” you mostly mean “USA”. In Mexico, everyone including the government, my bank, lawyers, and even telco would WhatsApp me.

In the English language "America" typically refers to the US because Anglos don't pretend North and South America are a single continent while separating Europe and Asia. There's no ambiguity when someone says "America".

Re: How WhatsApp became an unstoppable global cultural force

#160

Post by sometimes_all »

WhatsApp in India is inescapable, but also quite useful, primarily because of network effects. But you really have to be careful and sparing with it, else it becomes a nuisance. Thankfully they've done some work to that effect.

Example, adding an option to have to seek your permission to join a particular group is a godsend, since family members are all too happy to add you to their group where every post is a nonsensical forward, or random people add you to their "investments" group (pump and dump schemes). Also, considering the scale of WhatsApp, I get far fewer spam than I get in direct phone/SMS communication. Also I can block businesses permanently if they start abusing their messaging privileges.

I just wish they had kept it a more chat-focused platform rather than adding other stuff (channels, status, AI agents, etc). It's a pain that I can't disable features I don't need (eg. I don't want to use Meta AI, but I still have to see that annoying icon). But it's Meta, and they don't necessarily respect people not wanting something, so don't think you can do much about it.

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