I have watched YouTube instructional videos, but I can’t see the appeal of watching a movie on a tiny phone screen. As to messaging apps, SMS and email work just fine but for anyone who cares I suspect they would simply jump to whatever messaging app did work.
Absolutely not. Telecommunications applications have extremely strong network effects. There is no jumping ship to whatever works, people will do whatever is necessary to join the network their social circles participate in. In my country it's virtually impossible to communicate without WhatsApp. People buy phones just to run WhatsApp. I've had Signal installed for years and I've not received a single message there, not even from technologically minded friends who really should know better.
Mobile telephony is irrelevant: 98% of incoming calls are automated marketing/scam calls, the rest are people who couldn't call me on WhatsApp for some reason. It gets to the point I wish I could turn it off. SMS is irrelevant: it's mostly 2FA codes, companies using it as a notifications system and phishing.
No such thing exists. At best you have people such as myself who care about alternatives. Those too have WhatsApp installed.
Try living in a country where nobody asks girls for their phone number anymore. They ask them for their WhatsApp. Phone numbers are just an old idiotic thing you need to put into your contacts database to get the person to show up in WhatsApp. The WhatsApp word itself has become part of the language as a synonym for message, just like the Google verb has become a synonym for search in the anglosphere. People even compressed it into "zap" to make it easier to say. "I gotta go but I'll send you a zap later." Want to order some food? You want the restaurant's WhatsApp. Those that don't have a WhatsApp contact are losing so much money it's not even funny because it's better than every single food app out there. First day in college? The very first thing you want to do is join your class's WhatsApp group, or make one if it doesn't exist. Actually, you'll want to make two: one with your professors and another without. If you don't do this, you'll be so hopelessly out of the loop you might as well quit. I had classmates who barely had money to buy a cheap phone being forced to do so because they couldn't keep up with classes otherwise. Their phones had literally a single app and that app was WhatsApp.
WhatsApp once refused to comply with a court order to decrypt user messages during a child abuse investigation. It was impossible to comply because they didn't have the end-to-end encryption keys to begin with. The judge got mad and blocked WhatsApp nation-wide at the ISP level as punishment. You would not believe the disruption and outrage this caused. I remember teaching at least 10 friends how to bypass the block with VPNs. Not only was it an ineffective and unpopular measure, it lasted only a couple days before a higher authority undid the judge's decision. In my country, judges are perceived as gods who can do literally anything they want, but WhatsApp is so important it put some much needed humility into them. The judge wasn't punishing WhatsApp, she was punishing every citizen of my country by denying them access to such a vital tool. WhatsApp is so important they replied to the fucking judge in english instead of portuguese. I still remember the judge's pissed off face when she talked about that during a media interview. The nerve, right?
The only thing I'll say about the security aspect though is the on-by-default cloud backups make the E2EE a red herring. Even if you turn it off on your own phone, it is almost certain the person you are talking to has it on. And if you turn it off it nags you to turn it back on after each update, most users will just do it to make the nagging go away, and FB know that.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/271561/number-of-sent-sm...
Given that the original claim was that "no-one uses SMS anymore", I think that's still demonstrably false. Your milder claim - "rare to find anyone under 60 who uses SMS as their primary messaging system" - seems likely to be true.
> The number of outgoing SMS and MMS messages sent in the United Kingdom (UK) fell to 48.68 billion in 2020, from a peak of 150.83 billion in 2012.
> The fall in the number of SMS and MMS messages sent over mobile networks in the UK, coincides with a surge in popularity of apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Globally, WhatsApp added 1.3 billion monthly active users from April 2013 to December 2017, replacing the need for sending SMS messages for many users.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/271561/number-of-sent-sm...
Trust me, yeah someone's grandparents who don't own smartphones might use SMS, but the vast majority of the population does not. The stats are right there.
Also note that number of SMS messages sent is not the same as number of people using SMS as a form of communication. Most texts are sent by bots either for legit things like 2FA codes or less legit things like phishing.
Now it might not on top by number of messages even if it’s close, but that’s a different question. If you’re going to pick one and only one service to use then texting makes you reachable by the widest possible audience demonstrating it’s still #1 by adoption.
> But SMS is gone and a lot of people disabled notifications for it as it’s only used for ads by the provider (and it was a big issue with the government tried to run health campaigns there).
My mobile carrier also thinks it's acceptable to send me ads via SMS. The very first time they did this, I disabled all SMS notifications forever. The government also tried to send me COVID-19 related messages but I only saw them years later when I randomly decided to clean up my SMS inbox.
They have only themselves to blame, really. If they wanted a clean communications channel, they should not have allowed companies to pollute it with an infinite amount of worthless noise. Nobody wants to be subjected to advertising.
Here are some sources for the event I described:
https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/19/whatsapp-blocked-in-brazil...
https://theintercept.com/2016/05/02/whatsapp-used-by-100-mil...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/19/whatsapp-ban-b...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2015/12/17/zuckerber...
What’s really interesting is you essentially need isolation to get a steady state dominance by any one platform, but nobody is actually isolated any more. New platforms win not by slowly growing 5 or 10% a year but by crazy exponential curves where 30% more people install in a single month.
Having said that I don’t mean to suggest WhatsApp is going to die in Brazil tomorrow. Their currently is no real need to move right now.
Nobody buys it.
Do Linux phones have access to WhatsApp? If not, there is no point. It will be a perfectly good mobile computer but it will never actually replace the one in my pocket. And that's coming from a programmer who loves Linux. Imagine the utter disdain normal people would have for a phone that doesn't even run WhatsApp.
(Sailfish OS is a Linux based mobile distro.)
In any case totally evil behavior from their side. Its already bad enough they run totally proprietary centralized service with no public API & ignore any non-mainstream mobile platforms. But when they start banning users of third party clients on those platforms and go after third party client developers with presumably legal treats - that's pure evil, no way around it.
How commercially successful it'd be is still a different story, but it could run WhatsApp.
For another, SafetyNet is used primarily for DRM on streaming services and for banking or other financial apps. Absolutely no messenger uses it that I am aware of (unless you count Snapchat as a "messenger" but that's literally it).
Every FB owned app runs fine on Android devices that fail SafetyNet. No reason to believe that'll change because where's the benefit for FB?
I do, and it's pretty popular, so I don't think you should discount it so quickly.
Messaging apps have a network effect. You can't just jump ship from one at will, or you get cut off from all of your friends who didn't jump along with you.
In some countries - primarily Russia, but also in Europe e.g. Germany and increasingly the UK - Telegram is also popular, and Viber is popular in African countries, while WeChat is used extensively in China, and so on... people have to use the messenger everyone else is on.
I do use Signal to chat to close friends, and Telegram has become popular enough as a second to WhatsApp that I often use it too, but as others have said it's a strong network effect.
The only other messenger I can remember having the position WhatsApp has was BBM back in the day. But as soon as BlackBerries went out of fashion it was all WhatsApp and has been ever since.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/271561/number-of-sent-sm...
That works in a different way. Today you have WhatsApp and Signal. 95% of your friends are on WhatsApp and 5% are on Signal. Now let's say Signal starts taking over. In five years it's the other way around. This is possible because you can install them both on the same device during the transition.
If you buy a kind of phone that can run Signal but not WhatsApp at the time when 95% of your friends are still on WhatsApp, that doesn't work. You're not going to buy that phone right now because your friends haven't moved yet and won't for another five years.
First you have to spend five years getting everyone to switch messaging apps, and even then you can only switch platforms if the next messaging app to become popular runs on the new platform, which it generally doesn't, because nobody writes apps for platforms nobody uses and nobody uses platforms with no apps.
The usual solution to this is something like wine that allows you to run the old platform's apps on the new platform. But Google prevents that by encouraging third party apps to have dependencies on SafetyNet or some other Google services or code that the new platform can't easily implement as a result of excessive complexity or legal restrictions.
The effect is like crystallization even if 99.99999% of a mixture is in state X only a tiny seed is needed because it’s a one way conversion. People have a reason to install app Y, and no real need to use app X over app Y but they do have a reason to use app Y over app X.
Meanwhile the first kid could only convince five out of twenty friends to install the new app, and also couldn't run some other apps the new platform doesn't have, and then complains to the parents to return that phone and get a different one.
Further people often switch clients even when they have friends on the old platform simply because it’s the new thing. That’s how all the current major messaging platforms took off, none of them are very old.
People switch to new messengers sometimes, true. But the next one isn't going to be yours unless you have a surplus of luck in addition to skill. The next one is with high probability going to be someone else's.
The real problem is that when it happens, you need the new one to support the new platform. Which it doesn't have any incentive to do when nobody uses the new platform. Convincing the next one to be on your platform is the same problem as convincing the existing one. The transition has nothing to do with it.
Consider even just adding advertisements is enough to eventually lose the top spot because there is so much competition.
I asked google:
number of signal users: 40 million
number of telegram users: 400 million
I certainly wouldn't say I am.
In 2020 the average cellphone user in North America only consumed 11.8 GB per month and the median is much lower. That really isn’t enough to be regularly be watching videos.
It's partly the reason I got a Fold 3. Very good for on the move media consumption.
As for data use, aside from the points already brought up - ability to download for later from Netflix, certain services not counting towards data usage on some plans, etc - Netflix and other streaming services will also know you are on a mobile network and provide a more compressed stream at a lower resolution (720p with lower encoding settings being common) to reduce data usage and buffering.
Which gets back to the basic point people don’t watch a lot of video on cellphones and Netflix is usage is even lower.