WhatsApp, OTOH, is huge, and that’s an app that’s not installed by default and automatically consists of your entire address book as contacts but instead you have to go ahead and download it and explicitly add contacts to it, and yet it’s almost certainly bigger than imesssage outside the U.S. and is growing rapidly within the U.S.
… which has become a privacy issue now. If WhatsApp has been granted full access to the contact list, the contacts are passed onto Meta that uses numbers to track users, build out shadow profiles and whatever else they are not telling us about. It can be easily seen, e.g. if you add a new phone number that trickles through into WhatsApp, and if that new person happens to have an Instagram account, their Instagram profile will appear in the Instagram suggestions feed pretty much the next moment.
Meta has been agressively pushy in recent years with its attempt to monetise WhatsApp where they can't glean into the actual messages due to them being encrypted (unlike in Facebook Messenger). So they use the metadata and contacts (phone numbers, email, physical addresses etc) that Meta sells to third-parties, data brokers and businesses including. Messages on WhatsApp from South African, or Malaysian, or similarly remote locations offering jobs (!) or business opportunities are now a fairly regular occurence.
Considering the scale, the reach and popularity, the best option for WhatsApp would be to divest it from Meta (not that they would agree to it), however, the cost of running the platform, plus overall maintenance and feature development would be a substantial expenditure that has to be somehow funded since WhatsApp users will never agree to pay for WhatsApp, and many (who comprise a substantial to very large cohort) will not be able to afford paying for it.
So, what is actually needed is an interoperable standard so that people have choices to go and leave as they please depending on the behavior of the developers/companies.
Which is exactly what is being done, so that's convenient.
Now I wish we could legislate a way to make a new standard for email and allow people to run it from their home (just like personal mailbox) to remove that power from big tech. The technical solution is probably not that hard but getting adoption without some sort of leverage is almost impossible...
That's a huge part of it. Finding good stats is hard, but take Denmark and Sweden, it more likely that not that the person you're messaging also have an iPhone. Still most countries, from the statistics I've seem, have around 20 - 33% iMessage usage. Sure some of these people also have Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, but 30% is still a massive number.
The thing Apple has going for it is that people can't switch, or they can, but the alternative is SMS. Some seem to think that if iMessage goes away, people will just switch to WhatsApp or Signal. NO, they'll fallback to SMS/MMS.
I know many iPhone users here who don’t even use iMessage. It’s activated, so it would show in the stats, but they’ll message everyone through WhatsApp.
In the US? Maybe. In Europe, where many people have Android phones and iPhone users need WhatsApp/Messenger anyway? I doubt it.
Switching is super hard when your primary platform just fallback to SMS.
If there's interop between the chat applications - and be honest, do any of them have a unique selling point that makes them significantly better to the average user? - then that restriction is lifted.
It improves competition, which is healthy in a free economy (something corporate liberals really push for), forcing the chat apps to innovate instead of benefit off of critical mass / first mover advantage.
Sure, but "the old one is no longer available" is absolutely going to get everyone to switch in the approximately 60 seconds it takes to go from the notification to having a new account.
I mean, Google basically does this every time they change the default Android messaging app (though in fairness they do get a huge advantage of already knowing all your contacts): https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...