this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2025
95 points (95.2% liked)
Technology
60320 readers
2759 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's quite simple, they were the first messaging service to take hold back when sending text messages was still quite expensive.
Unlike America, Europe did not really have unlimited text messaging plans, so when data plans became a thing people switched to alternatives, and Whatsapp was one of the early services that offered that. And then later they got bought by Facebook / Meta.
Now everyone uses it, so they benefit from a network effect. You use it because everyone you know uses it.
Edit: typo
Same thing in Brazil/South America. SMS was hugely expensive and lacked features. Whatsapp showed up around the time cellphone plans were all starting to sell "X gb" of internet data and became the standard for lack of competition. Nowadays it's so ubiquitous that we get free Whatsapp in all data plans, as not offering that would literally make your plan worthless.
Interesting! Didn't know any of that.