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Comment by toastal | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what markets WhatsApp is important to. In the UK quite a few people used it while briefly lived there, but in the US, Thailand, Vietnam, et.al. I didn't see anyone using or ever talking about it.

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In the Netherlands WhatsApp is so ubiquitous that it always surprises me to hear other countries are not 100% WA. (Besides China, for obvious reasons it doesn't surprise me China has their own app.)

The only people I know who don't use WhatsApp are very privacy focused and therefor use Signal.

Adding on to the other comments, I understand it is the default messaging app in Australia / New Zealand.

More roughly, my understanding of the messaging space was:

- USA: Facebook Messenger

- Japan, Taiwan: LINE

- China: WeChat

- Everywhere Else in the World: WhatsApp

And the comments here seem to basically bear that out.

I find it curious a lot of friends are getting back to Skype, for personal use, across continents, and not CorporateSkype/OC. Is this a huge selection bias thing? Don't know. Several have also recently deleted GMail.

I'm seeing a lot of push towards Discord in the USA as well; it's a bit awkward in that kind of usage, but when basically everyone is already using Discord on PC it's not hard to convince people to use the phone app.

Thailand is very much LINE and a close second is Messenger

it's huge in india. a phone that did not support it would definitely be a non-starter.

These answers have been insightful. Not sure why asking got me downvotes.

It is _the_ chat app in Brazil. Brazil is pretty big

India. I'm pretty sure they mean India.

European countries.

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