I guess if you want to lower that number, you'd need to build something better, in some way. Answered as another European who've had Whatsapp forever, as some stubborn people refuse to move away from it, and also bunch of businesses use it.
Maybe the EU or China will crack down on it. A single company shouldn't decide who gets to talk to half the world. If that company is American they will not tolerate it for long.
Personally DeltaChat is my new favorite Thing but it falls afoul of Zooko's Triangle - A WhatsApp number or POTS number is short because it's centrally controlled and you have to pay for each one. DeltaChat has public keys, so I have 20 of them, and nobody can control who gets one, but they're incredibly long... the QR codes are nightmares.
At one point people moved from something else to Whatsapp, and that happened before Whatsapp had 3 billion people on it. If it's good, early adopters will adopt it and want others to adopt it too, then it snowballs from there.
It has happened before, and as long as new regulation doesn't solidify Whatsapp/FB in their position, it can happen again :)
WhatsApp allowed people to send SMS without paying, or rather, paying just once to buy the app, so it was instantly valuable if you just convinced your spouse or parents or a single friend to install it.
To overcome it now, you need a lot more effort (or rely on enshittification, which I'm sure will happen).
And no one was paying per SMS at the time we were using SMS for communication, almost everyone I know were on monthly plans that gave you N text messages and N minutes of calls for static sum each month.
The first people I saw who started using whatsapp, was people who were communicating across the border, because even if you had a monthly plan, those didn't include international messages. Eventually we all converged on whatsapp because that's what outside family and relatives used anyways.
> paying for “N text messages per month” is precisely what people refer to as paying per message
Maybe I said it wrong, "N text messages per month" for me means "Pay us 10 EUR per month, send up to 5000 messages" for example. Doesn't matter how many you send, you pay the same.
While "pay per message" is "Every text message you send, costs 0.01 EUR". Maybe I'm using the wrong words, but that's how I understand it.
Most of the people who were "texters" (in my circles) were on plans offering the first way of paying, while hardly anyone was doing it the second.
Another important part, was that most telecom's had free SMS and calls if you were with the same company (and still do, AFAIK), so constant bickering about what plan people are on and why they don't change so it's free and yadda yadda.
Many people were already mostly texting for free at this point.
The rates people were paying back then were extortionate - like 60-90% profit margin. When WhatsApp launched, plans were 5-15 euros/month for 100-500 messages with ~0.15 per message for overages. So you might not count the bundle as a per text message, but it really is which you can tell by what happens if you send more than your bundle allowed. Compare that with WhatsApp’s $1/year for unlimited messaging and you start to see the pricing disparity.
Many people were not mostly texting free in 2009. I think you’ve got the timelines mixed up. That started changing towards the mid to late 2010s precisely because of internet-based chat apps on the phone and plummeting data costs making the telco’s SMS pricing plans insane.
The initial claim of "WhatsApp happened at a time when, in Europe, you paid for SMS." maybe was true in parts of Europe, but clearly not everywhere. People were mostly using the Facebook chat (not Facebook Messenger/Chat) already before Whatsapp started being used, although Whatsapp in Sweden still isn't as popular as in other countries. In Spain, everyone uses Whatsapp, in Sweden, seemingly the people I talk to only have Whatsapp to communicate with me and others outside the country.
> Many people were not mostly texting free in 2009
Most people I knew definitively were mostly texting for free even before 2009, again, at least in Sweden.
I grew up in Canada so my knowledge is purely from talking with people in non-Swedish parts of Europe that I met and also reading contemporary articles analyzing the space as well as retrospective analysis of what led to WhatsApp’s popularity and dominance.