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Comment by ddalex | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that Whatsapp is a very non-US-oriented app - its is very popular in EU and Asia/Africa/Latin America, but none of my US friends use it other than to reach us outside of the US.

Since it's not US-focused, the US execs (and boards, investors) tend to dismiss it. This explains why Whatsapp was left, relatively, untouched by FB in terms of user experience, after the acquisition - it's not shiny by any means for somebody in the valley, so no exec wants to hang that in their portofolio

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Which countries in Asia still count it as the most popular messaging app? China is on WeeChat, Korea has KakaoTalk and LINE is everywhere else. It is pretty amazing that Meta had three messaging apps and none of them are close to something like LINE in terms of ubiquity or utility.

In Indonesia WhatsApp is #1.

My understanding is that WhatsApp is pretty big in India and my experience is that WeChat is pretty ubiquitous within SE Asia. The Singapore govt uses WhatsApp now for much of its govt comms and a lot of small business uses WhatsApp. Also recently in the news, you can book an Uber via WhatsApp . I'd be curious how WhatsApp does in Japan and South Korea.

Also my hunch is that Aus and NZ use WhatsApp heavily too

From my experience, most messaging in Australia is done on FB Messenger and Instagram, or by SMS/iMessage.

I live in Hong Kong and WhatsApp is pretty big here.

Facebook Messenger seems to rule the roost here in NZ, WhatsApp probably a close second.

Not Asia, but SMS is dead pretty much in Haiti, and everyone uses WhatsApp. Internet usage is low enough to even be an alternative to phone calls in most cases (especially for the young adults category).

I've never heard of LINE. What makes it different?

Asian messenger apps like LINE are really more of an “everything app.” I use LINE to chat with everyone. In Taiwan it’s a given that that anyone you meet will have LINE. Businesses have a special business line account that staff can use. You can book your hotel, vet apt, reserve a table, etc because every business has LINE. You can pay for things with it by letting someone scan your code or or pay for things online by clicking a link that opens line so you can authorize the payment.

As far as the messenger goes, it works really well. They’ve done the best job I’ve seen at making chat history searchable or let you jump to a date instead of scrolling backwards for an hour. They also allow you to send cute stickers, and they are used constantly.

That's fascinating. So if it's compromised, _everything_ is compromised?

The amount of personal data left in chats would be worrying for sure. Not to mention security culture is not really tight here. I’ve had hotels ask me to send a picture of my credit card for payment a few times.

As far as other things being compromised, I’d just deauth line from my bank account.

Literally all of India uses WhatsApp. Non-WhatsApp users (exclusively Signal/Telegram/Mitron or whatever homegrown flavour of the day) are a rounding error.

The recent privacy notice from WhatsApp gave some boost to signal and telegram, but it got nowhere. WhatsApp has become an integral part of Indian's life, it would be hard to break up that relationship.

That's not the point. Execs don't dismiss WhatsApp because it's not US-oriented enough and therefore not shiny. Large multinational companies don't have that strong of bias towards any market or they wouldn't be successful multinational in the first place. Also, who in their right mind would want to be in charge of a market leader with 2 billions users? WhatsApp is so unshiny that Will Cathcart was in Fortune 40 under 40 last year...

WhatsApp was not left untouched by the way. If you are not targeting entreprise customers, what really makes money in the messaging world is payments and WhatsApp is moving hard into this market. It's just doing so in India.

> a market leader with 2 billions users

2 billion of low-value users; FB users are accounted at $150 a head; out of 2 billion users it's account for, only ~100 million would part with a $1 / month to use the application - less that $12 a year per paying user. WhatsApp doesn't have any other monetisation strategy, there are no ads, and the markets they are in are extremely sensitive to fees for payments, for example.

> It's just doing so in India.

Everybody is doing so in India thanks to UPI. Google Pay, virtually unseen outside Tap and Pay in other markets, has 35% percent of the market in India - Whatsapp has a high 0.27% percent of the market in Sept 2021, up from 0.01% previously. https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/upi-top-3-retain-...

India payments competition is ruthless thanks to low barriers of entry.

You're right that WhatsApp really took their sweet time to copy WeChat. I wonder though whether there were mitigating factors. I know bringing WA onto the FB infra was a big job. Also had a friend that worked at WA and he was talking about India Payments over two years ago

>is a non-US-oriented app

what does that mean?

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