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Comment by dsl | Hacker News Reader

As of today: Smartphones outsold feature phones for this first time ever in India. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/samsung-smartphones-outse...

From my personal experiences, international countries that have smartphone adoption use Viber, and the feature phone countries use WhatsApp.

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WhatsApp is also really strong here in Germany and other parts of Europe. More of my friends are on WhatsApp than Facebook (only very few more though).

Also in the Netherlands. E.g. in June 2013, 75% of the smartphone users used WhatsApp daily. Moreover, more than three quarter of the Dutch citizens has a smartphone.

So, WhatsApp is definitely used in high-profit markets as well.

Source: http://www.nu.nl/tech/3506473/whatsapp-heeft-kwart-miljard-a...

These numbers are going to drop significantly now. Everyone I talk to is unhappy about the acquisition and will switch to something else like telegram.

Unless everybody switches, few will switch. Network effects also create some pretty powerful stickiness.

Unless Facebook actually puts their logo on WhatsApp, hardly anyone would notice. The tech community is minuscule compared to the large number of non-tech people using WhatsApp.

I'd say more than 99.9% of WhatsApp users haven't heard of Telegram.

WhatsApp users are mostly not early adopters like you and your friends. They are ordinary people, because WhatsApp is is a simple communication tool targeted to everyone. And that's why they keep doubling their user base.

The uproar in Spain about WhatsApp switching to $1 per year was huge, noisy and... emphemeral. Line got a lot of new signups for a few weeks, but the only person I know that still considers using Line today didn't even have WhatsApp back then (but, like everyone else, does have it now).

I live in Germany and must be a very poor soul as I only know one person with WhatsApp and dozens with Viber.

My (German) mom just asked about WhatsApp. So it must be mainstream.

Most likely because it is showing on the news everywhere?

Could be. I haven't been in Germany for 4 years now.

In Spain and Italy "sending a Whatsapp" is almost as idiomatic as "Googling something".

It has basically replaced texting. Even my mom use it, which for me it's the definition of "wildly popular".

Singapore is a Smartphone country, but Whatsapp is pretty dominant there. (I didn't run into anyone who didn't use it as their primary messaging platform)

Same in Argentina

In China, it seems to be Wechat. I had never heard of WhatsApp.

Same up here in Malaysia. In fact, it's starting to look like the only places that isn't dominated by WhatsApp are America and China.

You forgot china/Skorea/Japan, all big markets.

WeChat - china

S Korea - kakaotalk 90% market share

LINE - Japan 50 million users with 300 million worldwide

And all three have significant revenue in double digit US millions a year, unlike WhatsApp which has no real revenue...

Whatsapp has revenue in the double digit US millions per year. Their profit might even be in that range.

KakaoTalk is big in S Korea. LINE is big in Japan. LINE has 300 million users, with 50 million in Japan.

As far as I know, both are very profitable through sales of digital goods like stickers etc.

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