Comment by Retric
4 years ago
I don’t care about running either on my phone.
I have watched YouTube instructional videos, but I can’t see the appeal of watching a movie on a tiny phone screen. As to messaging apps, SMS and email work just fine but for anyone who cares I suspect they would simply jump to whatever messaging app did work.
> As to messaging apps, SMS and email work just fine but for anyone who cares I suspect they would simply jump to whatever messaging app did work.
Absolutely not. Telecommunications applications have extremely strong network effects. There is no jumping ship to whatever works, people will do whatever is necessary to join the network their social circles participate in. In my country it's virtually impossible to communicate without WhatsApp. People buy phones just to run WhatsApp. I've had Signal installed for years and I've not received a single message there, not even from technologically minded friends who really should know better.
WhatsApp only has 500m daily average users worldwide, while being installed on 2 billion phones. Do you expect it to maintain it’s #2 spot for 10 years? None of them have had a run that long.
Does it matter? The fact is pretty much everyone in my country uses WhatsApp. There is no getting away from it. It's so absurdly important ISPs have stopped metering WhatsApp traffic. A phone that doesn't run WhatsApp is a literal paperweight.
Mobile telephony is irrelevant: 98% of incoming calls are automated marketing/scam calls, the rest are people who couldn't call me on WhatsApp for some reason. It gets to the point I wish I could turn it off. SMS is irrelevant: it's mostly 2FA codes, companies using it as a notifications system and phishing.
19 replies →
It doesn't matter what will be dominant in 10 years. What matters for phones being bought today is what's dominant today.
9 replies →
> As to messaging apps, SMS and email work just fine but for anyone who cares I suspect they would simply jump to whatever messaging app did work.
Messaging apps have a network effect. You can't just jump ship from one at will, or you get cut off from all of your friends who didn't jump along with you.
They aren’t sticky enough on their own to avoid people just installing the next one. I think I have used 10 of the things at various points but SMS and email are still massively more popular. Remember Yahoo messenger etc?
This is a very US centric view. In virtually all of Europe, for instance, WhatsApp is the go to messenger and no one uses SMS anymore.
In some countries - primarily Russia, but also in Europe e.g. Germany and increasingly the UK - Telegram is also popular, and Viber is popular in African countries, while WeChat is used extensively in China, and so on... people have to use the messenger everyone else is on.
I do use Signal to chat to close friends, and Telegram has become popular enough as a second to WhatsApp that I often use it too, but as others have said it's a strong network effect.
The only other messenger I can remember having the position WhatsApp has was BBM back in the day. But as soon as BlackBerries went out of fashion it was all WhatsApp and has been ever since.
2 replies →
> They aren’t sticky enough on their own to avoid people just installing the next one. I think I have used 10 of the things at various points but SMS and email are still massively more popular.
That works in a different way. Today you have WhatsApp and Signal. 95% of your friends are on WhatsApp and 5% are on Signal. Now let's say Signal starts taking over. In five years it's the other way around. This is possible because you can install them both on the same device during the transition.
If you buy a kind of phone that can run Signal but not WhatsApp at the time when 95% of your friends are still on WhatsApp, that doesn't work. You're not going to buy that phone right now because your friends haven't moved yet and won't for another five years.
First you have to spend five years getting everyone to switch messaging apps, and even then you can only switch platforms if the next messaging app to become popular runs on the new platform, which it generally doesn't, because nobody writes apps for platforms nobody uses and nobody uses platforms with no apps.
The usual solution to this is something like wine that allows you to run the old platform's apps on the new platform. But Google prevents that by encouraging third party apps to have dependencies on SafetyNet or some other Google services or code that the new platform can't easily implement as a result of excessive complexity or legal restrictions.
6 replies →
are you representative of most people?
I certainly wouldn't say I am.
Considering actual adoption numbers I think I might be representing of most people in this. How many people do you know that actually watch Netflix on their phone?
I watch TV/movies almost exclusively on the phone. Not because it’s the best experience, but simply because it’s the only device that is on my person at all times. So it has been years since I thought in terms of going to a screen to watch something.
5 replies →