Yep. It's interesting how uniform the US messaging mesh is (practically everyone on iMessage). An average American's chance of having Whatsapp installed on their phone is a function of how likely they are to have contacts from abroad.
Not sure I agree. A generation or two is eons in tech. In that timeframe there will likely be another massive paradigm shift that totally washes away today’s thinking about phones, communication, etc.
Their existing market dominance among teens positions them very strongly to keep brand loyalty into whatever paradigms come next.
It’s also not just “social pressures to use iPhones” but the fact that parents can:
* give them hand me downs due to longer device lifespans
* the ability to get them more easily serviced when their kid breaks something by going to the Apple Store
* the ability to more easily buy a decent midrange device on a student discount
* the ability to communicate more easily themselves using iMessage
* appealing to privacy and safety in Apple marketing
People over index on social pressure from other teens. There’s lots of reasons teens get devices and many come from parental choices.
Maybe the percentages will vary as they grow but any company worth their salt is paying attention to the possibly high rate of market drop off that they’ll experience
It is interesting.
Vietnam: Facebook Messenger, Zalo (home grown IM), Viber.
None of these may have arisen or become so popular if Apple & Android had created interop.
But even without it, they are both E2E encrypted. Of course you could ship new code that send the messages unencrypted but it would be extremely risky for Meta and the government, depending on the target