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I read about WhatsApp and how people can't part with Meta because of it, however no one on my continent uses it. Why is it so popular in the EU and other parts of the world?
In Quebec a lot of people use it so it's not unheard of on North America.
Not sure myself. I have to use it for school but I plan on ditching it without giving a shit. People don't seem to like change, when I told a familiar to use Signal to contact me they said they won't and that I should use WhatsApp like "normal" people.
I'm in the UK. My friends and I all use WhatsApp because it's easy to create groups and to share photos, videos and documents with the group or individuals. Even the non-techie folk can use it without issues (apart from "oops wrong group", which is always entertaining). I find the calling feature useful because the cell phone signal is very poor where I live but I have good WiFi. Overall a simple app that does a few things well.
I hate Facebook, and it is me no end that WhatsApp is Meta.
How do thing like rich media, groups, etc work on sms? All these features are baked into messaging apps over data...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service
Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) is a standard way to send messages that include multimedia content to and from a mobile phone over a cellular network. Users and providers may refer to such a message as a PXT, a picture message, or a multimedia message. The MMS standard extends the core SMS (Short Message Service) capability, allowing the exchange of text messages greater than 160 characters in length. Unlike text-only SMS, MMS can deliver a variety of media, including up to forty seconds of video, one image, a slideshow of multiple images, or audio.
SMS does support group messaging too, but I don't know the term for the protocol there.
Beacause apple and imessages
Not sure why it was down voted
So it is in Germany. Only two of my friends use telegram, and I'm forced to use shitty Whatsapp. But I keep on converting people.
It was free in India even when it was paid in the rest of the world pre-Meta, while SMS was expensive as heck. It caught on and never lost momentum. Thankfully it was at least WA which became popular and not something else like Viber, ugh.
Yes, there was the issue of SMS cost and data limits, but also remember iPhones are considerably less ubiquitous outside the US.
Where iMessage and Facetime features are lacking in SMS, terrible in MMS, third party cross-platform apps were required and WhatsApp happened to become most popular. Now at least we have RCS, but it's a bit late to the party and poorly implemented.
