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Comment by theonlybutlet | Hacker News Reader

In the rest of the world the answer is simply Whatsapp. China it's WeChat. No need to discuss. You can also see if their contact is in the app.

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The second one is such a horrible thing that I wish it was blocked by the OS. Stop giving apps access to your entire contacts!

I did not consent to those companies knowing my phone number, name, and likely other information!

But you clicked a little button that they can so its completely fine! \s

That is likely my single biggest pet peeve of the current state of tech is other people being able to consent to MY information being gobbled up just because they clicked a damn button.

Although note that with SMS, you're consenting to multiple phone companies knowing your phone number, name, and definitely other information in the form of all your messages. Possible I should have made that clearer in the original article: it doesn't make sense to me that someone would stick with SMS because they don't want Meta/Google/Apple/whoever to have their info, unless they truly believe that AT&T/T-Mobile/Verizon/etc. are better stewards of our data. (And I don't mean to dunk on that latter group of companies here...I just don't have any reason to believe either group is better than the other.)

It's very confusing to me that Europe seems generally skeptical of big American tech, but has evidently jumped straight into bed with Facebook's WhatsApp with far more enthusiasm than Americans.

Maybe because most of the initial success was before Facebook bought Whatsapp. Until recently, lot of people were ignoring that their whatsapp was part of facebook (but those people were also using facebook messenger anyway).

Germany and Switzerland have some exotic secure messengers that were quite popular (and may still be) like threema.

There was also some quite suprizing stuff. My inlaws were, until recently, using Viber. They didn’t know why (none of them are computer people). It was wild to me to discover a chat app I never heard off in a circle of people completely outside of tech.

Anyway, the only longterm solution is an open standard. Propably XMPP. Or email after all (it works, look at delta chat).

Much as I would love an open standard to win here, their track record has not been great with respect to messaging. If someone (looking at you, Google) were to jump on board with one, that could change stuff.

But to be fair, most consumers aren't going to care about an open standard directly; they'll care about finding and chatting with their friends. An open standard is a great way to get there when it works, but, for example, WhatApp being a de facto standard in much of the world accomplishes the same thing in those regions.

> If someone (looking at you, Google) were to jump on board with one, that could change stuff.

Google jumped on jabber years ago, then jumped off.

> Maybe because most of the initial success was before Facebook bought Whatsapp.

I guess. But it doesn't really explain why it continues to be so popular, to the extent that even on forums like this (where well-grounded skepticism of big tech companies like Facebook is generally taken for granted) you have Europeans acting like Americans are backwards fools for not wanting to jump into bed with Facebook.

It is on every persons phone, it is the defacto standard. There was a big push about two years back by many people to change application when Whatsapp's privacy policy was changing and many pushed telegram and signal. The two or three of my friends, who left and held out, have now reinstalled Whatsapp. There's simply no easy way for them to speak to everyone else. People are reluctant to text and won't bother installing another application. (BTW this was in Africa.)

It was already fairly popular in the UK prior to being acquired by Facebook.

I’m guessing but in these other countries were SMS messages cheap/free?

While yes for many in the subsequent years, it wasn't at the time WhatsApp took over the world in 2011-2012. It didn't help for SMS when telcos were already giving unlimited social media in their plans and even prepaid, even when this already started to include unlimited SMS as well; people already migrated.

Its simplicity, cross-platform (as people out there use Android more than iOS) and user base was and still is the big moat; there have been quite superior applications over the years, yet none of them are used as the main messenger except by some niche communities. Telegram has been there since 2013, it's quite popular because of the features but I doubt it will take over: WhatsApp is enough and everyone already knows it.

No, that is not true, and five seconds of googling could have told you that.

What did you find?

For example this map:

This map also only shows the most popular, but that doesn't mean it's the dominant messaging app in that country. It's very, very messy.

It's safe to say the median app is Whatsapp. Countries like Australia still use Whatsapp. This picture you provided excludes the rest of subsaharan Africa which uses Whatsapp.

I'd rather not cite the below but where's smoke there's fire. This indicates Whatsapp has twice the active users of Messenger. https://www.statista.com/statistics/258749/most-popular-glob...

Yes, it is absolutely very popular, that's not what we're talking about here.

The problem is that given a random person off the street, how can you figure out which messenger apps you have in common? And assuming everyone outside the US uses WhatsApp like the grandparent poster I replied to did, doesn't work.

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