[HN Gopher] How WhatsApp became an unstoppable global cultural f...
___________________________________________________________________
How WhatsApp became an unstoppable global cultural force
Author : insane_dreamer
Score : 26 points
Date : 2024-12-12 02:14 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (restofworld.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (restofworld.org)
| exabrial wrote:
| What worries me is FB is in charge. It's allegedly secure, but
| closed source.
|
| What's their profit model here anyway?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I don't think it makes money. My best guess is it just was
| bought so no-one else bought it and linked a billion users into
| _their_ social network.
| kobalsky wrote:
| Whatsapp Business. $0.03-0.06 per conversation / authentication
| (multiple messages within 24hs) depending if it's transactional
| or marketing.
|
| SMS providers are unreliable and expensive, it's eating their
| business.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > SMS providers are unreliable and expensive, it's eating
| their business.
|
| Is it actually though? At least in the UK I still get every
| business message (delivery notifications, booking
| confirmations etc.) via SMS. I haven't received a single one
| via WhatsApp. And WhatsApp has 100% penetration here so that
| isn't a barrier.
| gfarah wrote:
| I can speak for LATAM, here WhatsApp it's much more
| reliable and faster than SMS
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Drives users to FB, IG, and therefore ... ads.
| asplake wrote:
| Does it? I'm a regular WhatsApp user and haven't touched any
| other Meta app in a long time. Easy to forget that they're
| connected.
| itikasp wrote:
| Hey, I am one of the editors on this story, and we had the same
| question. Sharing with you a separate story from this package
| that explains the math/finance of WhatsApp. Hope this answers
| your question: https://restofworld.org/2024/how-whatsapp-for-
| business-chang...
| noprocrasted wrote:
| It collects people's contacts and social graphs, which are then
| used to influence ad targeting in Meta's other platforms.
|
| That's why it insists so badly on having full access to your
| contacts.
| bonzini wrote:
| They bought WhatsApp to keep businesses on Facebook and to
| prevent it from being an actual "everything app", though in the
| end they started offering WhatsApp Business anyway.
|
| A lot of this became public from FTC vs Meta:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/ftc-facebook-lawsuit-makes-z...
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| >What's their profit model here anyway?
|
| users data, perhaps? your data feed into FB's machine. I'm sure
| they will figured out how to make money.
| impish9208 wrote:
| Posted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42375926
| Tomte wrote:
| And who cares? There are zero comments.
| Gooblebrai wrote:
| You mean 4 days ago?
| gnabgib wrote:
| Small discussion (10 points, 13 hours ago, 5 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42387220
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| 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 won't
| happen). But I'm curious as to why such as "super-app" hasn't
| taken root in the US like it has elsewhere.
| itikasp wrote:
| 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
| Android users, which adds to the popularity of WhatsApp.
| brudgers wrote:
| Facetime was announced as an intended open standard. Shortly,
| Apple realized their advantage of keeping it closed.
| Uehreka wrote:
| Idk how much of an advantage this has turned out to be.
| Like GP said, FaceTime is not as popular outside of the US
| because it isn't on Android. Even its US popularity is
| limited by the fact that it doesn't work with Android/PC
| users, mandating that you have another app (which likely
| works as well as FaceTime) on hand for those situations. I
| think this is more of an example of them shooting
| themselves in the foot for no advantage, but not caring
| because they have like 300 feet.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| A patent lawsuit kept them from opening it up at the time.
| I think it's only recently been resolved.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| An interesting tidbit is that WhatsApp actually predates
| FaceTime and iMessage, and thus it was one of the earliest
| iPhone apps that allowed sending text messages over data as
| opposed to SMS. Interoperability with Android was a plus.
|
| I was tremendously pissed off when I moved from a BlackBerry
| (with blackberry messenger and "free over data" messaging) to
| an iPhone in 2008 and had to go back to paying per sms sent.
| The moment WhatsApp became available I got it (and paid for
| it!) and have been using it ever since.
|
| I wonder what other iPhone users did for data messaging
| before iMessage became available.
| epx wrote:
| At least here in Brazil, WhatsApp consolidated its position
| by working well in feature phones that ran J2ME and
| dominated the low-end market before Android. It took
| testing and adaptation to each and every available phone
| (as far as I can remember, J2ME was kind of a loose
| standard so developing a J2ME on one device did not
| guarantee it ran well, or at all, in any other). This,
| coupled with the possibility of eliding the outrageous SMS
| rates and the availability of EDGE data plans.
| Zak wrote:
| I found it surprising at the time that instant messaging
| apps that originated on PCs (ICQ, AIM, Skype, etc...) did
| not get widely adopted for this role despite most of the
| well-known ones releasing iOS and Android versions at the
| time.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| ICQ and AIM were pretty much dead already.
|
| Microsoft really missed an opportunity, I remember using
| a third party app for Messenger and the mobile experience
| wasn't great. Skype was too focused on voice and video
| calls, not seen as an instant messaging app, even though
| it could very well have been.
|
| The biggest fumble really comes from Google though. I was
| using Google Talk as my main messaging app on PC, and
| Android had pretty much everything ready before iOS,
| including video chat over 3G.
|
| However Google went through a pointless revamp with
| Hangouts and never managed a convincing SMS integration.
| Zak wrote:
| 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
| recognize just how fast their influence was waning.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| 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 and Google Messages more seriously.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Because WhatsApp was the first with password less-login
| using SMS login.
|
| It was dead simple to use. You had a phone, installed
| Whatsapp, it sent you a verification text that it
| automatically read and verified to ensure you owned that
| phone number, and that was your "account".
|
| No user names to remember, no passwords, a completely
| computer illiterate person could use it, especially if
| their first device ever was a smartphone.
|
| And it worked amazingly well. And there was no spam. I
| specifically remember sharing contacts being a pain in
| the ass until WhatsApp came along.
| Zak wrote:
| I suppose none of the others, which could have leveraged
| their existing userbase chose to follow suit because the
| companies that owned them did not have a way to make
| money from them. WhatsApp didn't either, but startups
| weren't expected to.
| orf wrote:
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > 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
| akira2501 wrote:
| Do you think it could be that general purpose computers tend
| to exist as household items here moreso than in other parts
| of the world? I see my phone as a small extension of a much
| larger and more capable computing base. Is that view even
| possible in other parts of the world?
| okanat wrote:
| WhatsApp was there before Apple. There was even Symbian
| versions of it.
|
| The reason it got so popular in other counties is the
| extortionate pricing of SMSes. WhatsApp used (and still uses)
| very little data and with the lowest level data tariff you
| would still get more messaging quota. Moreover it costed
| nothing when WiFi on phones became a thing. Then sending
| pictures for free became a thing too.
|
| They were also a smaller company and it didn't bother people
| to pay a small amount for all of the benefits they got.
| josu wrote:
| The US was one of the few countries in the world where there
| were unlimited SMS plans. So by the time Whatsapp came around
| instant free messaging was already ubiquitous. This wasn't
| the case for most other regions, where Whatsapp actually
| brought free unlimited mobile messaging.
| comprev wrote:
| WhatsApp was a paid product to start with.
| notahacker wrote:
| It cost ~$1 (initially a one time fee, later joiners paid
| annually). Depending on your SMS plan, that might be paid
| for with the first 10 messages you sent. There was zero
| additional cost to use to send a lot of messages,
| including pictures and group messages. This was quite
| different to most mobile contracts at the time
| viraptor wrote:
| It wasn't even enforced though. Charged only after a
| year, but you could reinstall and get another year free.
| deergomoo wrote:
| It seems to be quite variable over the world. WhatsApp is
| massive here in the UK but pretty much only as a chat app.
| Veserv wrote:
| 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 regulated to the point where many international
| banks do not even want to take US customers because that would
| subject them to US laws about banks. That is how insanely
| challenging it is for literal banks with decades of past and
| current experience to manage the regulations. "Move fast and
| break things" would get "Go directly to jail, do not pass go".
| Even money transmitter licenses like Paypal and Venmo are
| extremely challenging. And even those companies try really hard
| to make sure they do not get classified as a bank.
|
| Trying to graft on a social platform onto a bank or a money
| transmitter would make the _entire_ social platform subject to
| bank /money transmitter business restrictions which is almost
| certainly doomed legally. It is not like these companies do not
| know to add payments, it is just so insanely hard that even the
| 900 pound gorillas do not want to mess with Godzilla.
| orf wrote:
| 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.
| Veserv wrote:
| 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
| orf wrote:
| 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.
| dheera wrote:
| In China, WeChat supports messaging, payments, as well
| as:
|
| - 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.
| orf wrote:
| Yes, but the question was "does this exist anywhere other
| than in China?"
|
| China is a pretty specific and unique market. Perhaps the
| existence of such an "everything app" is related to that,
| explaining why it doesn't exist elsewhere?
| out_of_protocol wrote:
| Telegram moving in this direction very fast. At this
| moment, telegram is used as news, blogs, file transfer
| app, chat etc. Recently added miniapps with real payments
| integration, "stars" as internal currency
| wenc wrote:
| Yes, they exist elsewhere. Check out Grab (southeast
| Asia), Line (Japan, Taiwan), Kakao (Korea), Gojek
| (Indonesia), PayTm (India) or any number of everything-
| apps.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| Kaspi in Kazakhstan
| Veserv wrote:
| Yes, very few countries have a app where you can do
| "everything" in it. "This clear definition is really hard
| to achieve, therefore it must mean something different"
| is not a counter-argument.
|
| I observe that these applications which are everything
| apps almost always have integrated payments platforms.
| This is not always the case, but seems to be the
| stickiest part of the offering. My thesis is that a
| competitive application with a integrated payments
| platform will eventually outcompete the ones without.
| Payments are possible in China with WeChat which is
| dominant. Payments are possible in India and Brazil with
| WhatsApp which are their dominant markets.
|
| Counter-examples would take the form of markets/countries
| where there are multiple-domain applications with
| payments platforms that rapidly lose or lost marketshare
| to multiple-domain applications without payments. Markets
| where no popular application has payments provide no
| information as to the relative value of a integrated
| payments platform.
| orf wrote:
| > I observe that these applications which are everything
| apps almost always have integrated payments platforms
|
| But this is essentially a sample size of 1?
|
| There's definitely an advantage to having integrated
| payments if you want to do "everything" (most of which
| requires or is related to payment of some kind).
|
| But IMO you're missing the forest for the trees: adding a
| payment button to an app is essentially integrated from
| the PoV of the user - you can do it with Apple Pay or
| google wallet seamlessly. So why isn't this good enough?
|
| That lacks payments between friends, so that's the most
| important factor? But then in most first-world countries
| you're now competing against banks (old and new), who
| solve this really well, and a myriad of country-specific
| shit. That's why they don't exist.
|
| So really, it's not just "payments" - it's _becoming the
| common digital medium of exchange_ , and that can only
| happen now for very large, single currency markets that
| are starting to transition from an unbanked cash based
| society to a banked one.
|
| You can't just shove payments onto WhatsApp and expect
| people to use it to pay their utility bills in a market
| that has established and seamless ways to do this
| already.
| Swizec wrote:
| > It succeeded because it was around at the time where SMS
| messages where expensive, but smart phones where exploding
| in popularity.
|
| Not sure that's true everywhere. In Slovenia we had
| unlimited texting way before we had smartphones.
|
| By around 2005 all carriers offered a "teenager" plan with
| unlimited texting and near zero phone minutes. Data was not
| yet a selling point.
| conradfr wrote:
| SMS is one part of the story, group messaging is the
| other one.
| Zak wrote:
| WhatsApp appears to support payments in India, and nowhere
| else.
| Veserv wrote:
| India and Brazil [1]. Only their two biggest markets [2].
|
| [1] https://faq.whatsapp.com/1293279751500598
|
| [2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-
| rankings/whatsapp-...
| meiraleal wrote:
| The usage of the payment feature in Brazil is very, very
| low. I never heard about anyone using it. The Central
| Bank launched a national payment system (Pix) at the same
| time whatsapp wanted to launch their solution so they
| made Meta wait a few more months to get authorization.
| Now everybody uses Pix.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >But I'm curious as to why such as "super-app" hasn't taken
| root in the US like it has elsewhere.
|
| because there's a lot more traditional banking and business
| infrastructure in the US or Europe than there is in China or
| India, so the latter just leapfrogged over it and the
| experience of using Alipay or running your business of Whatsapp
| is just much better than any legacy institution in those
| countries. People in countries with more established ways of
| doing things are both too used to and don't have that much of
| an incentive to switch because most stuff works sort of okay.
|
| Same reason why WhatsApp adoption itself is lower in the US and
| sms based messaging held out so long. The US had cheap sms
| plans earlier so people were less eager to switch while
| everyone else just jumped to internet based messaging.
| Zak wrote:
| 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.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| 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.
| Zak wrote:
| Sure. Americans with close or many international contacts
| almost certainly use an internet-based chat/voice app with
| those contacts. That's not a large enough percentage than
| any one messaging app is a viable option for a group chat
| involving a dozen randomly-selected Americans. Almost every
| time, one or two of them will steadfastly refuse to install
| any app and insist on using MMS.
| kazen44 wrote:
| 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 to an EU directive, but at that time whatsapp
| was already very large across the EU.
| Mond_ wrote:
| This isn't really what an "everything app" is. WhatsApp is a
| chat app (+ some barebones community stuff, which Telegram and
| Discord also have).
|
| To be an everything app, it needs to have, at the very least, a
| built-in payment system, fully featured social media content
| (ie. proper feeds and comments, at least on the level of
| Twitter), and non-trivial integration with other apps,
| businesses, and/or government entities. (This isn't even
| getting into eg. paying rent, ordering takeout, playing games,
| etc.)
|
| Calling WhatsApp is just kind of missing the point of the
| definition.
| spookie wrote:
| Yeah I fear this is the case really. At most, WhatsApp is a
| way to communicate with businesses while keeping a separation
| of concerns for those running them.
|
| It is simply better than SMS and is dead simple. You can have
| a business app that makes this be a separate thing from your
| personal life while using the same phone.
|
| I have seen it used as a way to contact restaurants or local
| stores, order stuff, but that was the extent of it. Just
| communication, nothing else.
|
| For me, at least, it has only been the messaging app I'm
| willing to use to be in touch with non-techie friends.
| dheera wrote:
| 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 documents, and mail follow up shit to
| your residential address. They won't give you medical records
| on anything other than a fucking CD-ROM, even in 2024. Somehow
| in the US, a messaging app isn't "official" enough, and there's
| going to be the one first amendment brat* that doesn't want to
| install WhatsApp for privacy reasons.
|
| * I say this jokingly, and do think we need to be harsher on
| corporations. However, my point is that in collectivist
| countries like Indonesia/China, if you don't install
| WhatsApp/WeChat or whatever is the chosen national app, you'll
| be the outcast and nobody will help you. The collectivist
| societies tend to embrace these apps for their convenience,
| rather than question their terms and conditions.
| tuna74 wrote:
| "In the US, they want you to register some stupid MyHealth
| thing, sign some paper documents, and mail follow up shit to
| your residential address. They won't give you medical records
| on anything other than a fucking CD-ROM, even in 2024.
| Somehow in the US, a messaging app isn't "official" enough,
| and there's going to be the one first amendment brat* that
| doesn't want to install WhatsApp for privacy reasons."
|
| That is because you don't have any good online ID
| authenticator. Something like BankId in Sweden is so
| incredibly practical in a lot of ways.
| dheera wrote:
| bankid.com: "To get a BankID, you must have a Swedish
| personal identity number"
|
| What do non-citizens use in Sweden to get around?
|
| The "everything apps" of places that have them aren't
| usually restricted to only citizens (though some admittedly
| have shitty UIs for non-citizens)
| wasmitnetzen wrote:
| Everyone who's a permanent resident in Sweden gets a
| personal identity number, it's not tied to your
| citizenship. That would be illegal anyway, at least for
| citizens of other EU countries.
|
| There's a lower-level, different number, which is less
| powerful, but easier to get.
| messe wrote:
| > Everyone who's a permanent resident in Sweden gets a
| personal identity number, it's not tied to your
| citizenship
|
| Same in Denmark too. You get a "CPR" number, and can
| login to most government services (as well as some
| commercial ones) with "MitID" (my ID). It's quite
| convenient. I can even use my MitID to buy alcohol
| without having to interact with another human being in
| Rema 1000 using their self-checkout app.
|
| Ireland--where I moved from--has a similar "PPS" number
| that all residents can get, although the online aspect is
| not nearly as well integrated as it is here in Denmark;
| it's slowly improving.
| NoLinkToMe wrote:
| It's the first time I hear that Whatsapp is already an
| everything app. Ive used Whatsapp for about 14 years or so on a
| daily basis as my main app. But it's just chat for me, and
| about 30% of my non-professional calls. And I use the share
| location feature a lot when meeting friends. But that's about
| it.
|
| But banking, social media, ID/login, maps, albums, browsing etc
| I all do outside of whatsapp.
| richardw wrote:
| Honestly, it was just what it enabled. U.S. had cheap/free
| texting, so the network effect of just staying where you are
| was huge. Outside the US, there was only expensive texting so
| there was a latent need.
|
| 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.
| wenc wrote:
| This is why travel is so important -- it gets us out of our
| bubbles.
|
| Once I was brainstorming with a German colleague about a new
| business chat feature, and he said we should target WhatsApp as
| a channel. My American colleagues were like, "No one uses that
| these days."
|
| But Americans have little idea how popular WhatsApp really is
| in Europe, and Brazil (where it's colloquially called Zappy
| Zappy), and vast swaths of the world. The American experience
| isn't as normative as we assume. I only know this because I'm
| part of a diaspora network and I have contacts from all over
| the world -- FB Messenger and iMessage are not as popular as we
| think outside of certain high GDP countries.
|
| Conversely, some suggested targeting iOS in Germany, but my
| German colleague immediately said that iOS marketshare in
| Germany is actually fairly low. That surprised me but he was
| right.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/461900/android-vs-ios-ma...
|
| Even France, with its reputation for liking premium products,
| does not have a high iOS market share.
|
| Japan does have a very high iOS market share however because
| they appreciate craftsmanship, and due to Softbank's efforts in
| the country.
|
| I remember the early days of WhatsApp -- it was _the_ non-SMS
| messaging platform of choice in an era when phone plans changed
| for texting.
| spookie wrote:
| Apple devices cost more in Europe, a jump high enough that
| you might as well consider the competition. I'm taking VAT
| into account.
|
| That and, well... Google has been more supportive of EU
| countries than Apple. Apple maps was useless in the EU for a
| long time. Plus horrendous support across the EU. If you are
| in a big city, yeah you will find an Apple Store, otherwise
| tough luck.
|
| It has nothing to do with craftmanship.
| narrator wrote:
| [delayed]
| crop_rotation wrote:
| 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), and more
| because of the simplicity and ease of use.
| RustySpottedCat wrote:
| Uuh, where do you live? I haven't met a single person
| (technical or non technical) with such an attachment to a
| single app in my life.
| Kiro wrote:
| The question is where you live where this is not the case.
| You're the outlier here.
| nemomarx wrote:
| 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?
| crop_rotation wrote:
| Yes the US is one of the only rare places where Whatsapp
| is not omnipresent (and it is the only presence where RCS
| has any meaningful chance of ever being used.
| bryant wrote:
| There are many examples all over the world. Plenty of
| countries have people that have attachments to apps like
| whatsapp, telegram, etc.
|
| All of my friends in brazil, for instance, are entirely
| attached to whatsapp.
|
| I agree with the other reply. Where do you live? I'm
| surprised that you haven't encountered any. Every city in the
| US that I visited and every city that I visited
| internationally has people that attach themselves to one of
| either whatsapp, telegram, imessage, etc.
|
| (I'm kind of excluding wechat here because wechat seems to be
| forced, but there are plenty of people who have this
| attachment to wechat as well because of its status as an omni
| app)
| titanomachy wrote:
| 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?
| crop_rotation wrote:
| Plain text chats only, pinned chats for todos. Named empty
| groups for notes. The fact that Whatsapp has no features is a
| plus for such users as they find doing whatever they want
| very simple.
|
| The above are just two examples but people really do almost
| everything within Whatsapp without using any special
| features.
| gmuslera wrote:
| ... and one ring to bind them.
|
| Even if it were an open source app with open governance, the
| shaping of culture happens at a different layer. And that shaping
| sometimes is guided and not in the best interest of the users.
| nashashmi wrote:
| I still feel like WhatsApp had a stronger position to do better
| in both developing countries and developed countries. But for
| some reason unknown, it did not roll out plans and positions fast
| enough.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _How WhatsApp for business changed the world_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42366753 - Dec 2024 (163
| comments)
| elAhmo wrote:
| I feel like I am missing something. It is a chat app, one of
| many, with some features like communities (which feel like
| extremely large groups) and status updates (which almost every
| other app does).
| Beijinger wrote:
| I was surprised when I returned to the US that not everybody uses
| WhatsApp. I was also using WeChat a lot in Asia. What has become
| very powerful in my opinion, and it used a lot by larger groups
| is Telegram.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-12-14 23:00 UTC)