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Comment by jdlyga | Hacker News Reader

It's odd how ubiquitous WhatsApp is in Europe. How and why did it catch on there so completely?

Easy. European Countries are so small, esp compared to America, and there is a ton of movement between them so need to communicate between countries was high. However, SMS between different country cell networks was extremely expensive for various reasons. However, data and data roaming was not. Since WhatApp is entirely data to cellular company, it caught on and network effect took over.

It’s also nice to use for calling with US people that are willing to put up with it.

How do US people do intentional calls?

Most don't. The few who have international contacts tend to pick whatever their contact uses.

Depending on your family/travel background, it's very possible you don't or don't enough to need WhatsApp.

We travel overseas but everyone we have met just keep in communication over Facebook.

All our family is in the United States. When we are overseas, we just use wifi calling to communicate back home or since most people have iPhones, iMessage/Facetime.

My brother is about distance of Moscow to Lisbon from me, still a free call since it's domestic.

In addition to that, WhatsApp was available at the time on Symbian devices and Nokia’s S40 devices (I remember downloading Jar and Jad files for button mobile devices, and each update was free up to year then it was a dollar for a year)

Crazy! You made me remember i actually once paid for "something" when it comes to Whatsapp! Then they added somekind of disclaimer "will be a paid service xxxxxyyyy" but it never happened!

Yes I don't remember what I paid for.

Pretty sure i paid 0.99 for ... something. I don't remember what either. Might have been 1 year of service after the first year.

Hilarious we both don't know what we even paid for or why!

But it seemed all worth it at the time, right?

I think it was more or less “nag ware”. I remember clicking “no, later” multiple times in a row and they’d only ask like twice a year. I don’t think it ever stopped working for people who didn’t pay (afaik).

The fact that WhatsApp is also gigantic in large countries with no intermobility between them (Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria) would suggest that the only issue that mattered was the fact that ~2011, mobile carriers would charge insane rates for SMS.

For sure, but from what I understand, in some European Countries in 2011, SMS was free if your recipient was inside the country but cost if they were not due to tariffs and interconnect fees. Since Europeans do move between countries thanks to that European Union thing, it became a problem and WhatsApp became the solution.

Sure, other countries it might have picked up domestically thanks to high SMS prices but low data prices.

But why WhatsApp in Western Europe and Viber on the Balkan Peninsula?

I am not sure this is true. European countries are smaller but they are not that small. The number of people sending SMS to a foreign number regularly is I guess not significant. Potentially it was easier for people working abroad to stay in touch with people back home. If anything like that, it would be more true that it's the cost of SMS within the country - it was always increasingly unlimited but not 10+ years ago, mine was I think 9 cents. If you had like a 1GB of data, then it was a no brainer to save the 9 cents.

In Spain I guess it is because SMS have never been free (or similar). It took off well before wifi was widespread in homes and offices, IIRC.

Edit: it costs me around .10€ to send an SMS...

Same in the Netherlands.

In Italy SMS are included in the monthly plan since many years, but everyone is using WhatsApp too.

My plan includes free SMS, but nobody is capable of reading or sending SMS anymore. Mobile phones can only have three apps: phone, WhatsApp and shop discount apps

Free messaging. And nowadays free calls- when my brother calls me from Japan he uses WhatsApp. I have no idea how they make money but I'm not complaining.

Imagine a time when telcos literally demanded 50 cents for every time you asked "where are you".

It's meta. They make money from advertising.

there are no adverts on whatsapp

But Facebook collects your interactions, adds them to your (shadow) profile, and sells this marketing data to advertisers.

Yep, its popularity basically matches up with places where SMS cost money. It's ended up being a work around the ridiculous telecom billing.

From what I've heard, it's ubiquitous everywhere except North America, where it is still quite popular. In South America, everyone uses it, even to message their doctor with a random question.

I'm not sure if the sms cost was the reason, at least in my fuzzy memories. I think by the time whatsapp showed up I had already had unlimited national sms for a couple years.

However, sms is extremely limited and mms is crap.

Whatsapp is text messaging that works.

iMessage is useless because more than half of your contacts have Android. Plus it's less intuitive and has fewer features than WhatsApp. Possibly because it's designed by americans used to the dark ages of sms :)

Whatsapp is huge more or less anywhere that isn't iMessage or Line Dominated, so... S. America, Africa, Europe and some subset of Asian Countries

They got a HUGE headstart back when Black Berry was the smartphone to have and basically never stopped

I am sure it’s directly correlated to iPhone market share.

It's not. Whatsapp was popular in Europe before iMessage existed.

The ubiquity of unlimited SMS on US phone plans in the early 2010s is probably the biggest factor.

And why not Signal?

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