Comment by josephcsible
4 years ago
> 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.
In 2020 and the UK alone 50 billion SMS text messages where sent, that’s quite a bit for something nobody uses. It’s very true people send use other platforms to send a lot of messages, but they all lack the utter ubiquity of SMS.
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> 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.
Your assuming the market is homogeneous with you. Someone buys their kids phone X because they don’t care. Now their kids friends are forced to use a different app to talk to those kids. Even tiny fraction of the market can force huge numbers of people to install and use a different messaging app.
The effect is like crystallization even if 99.99999% of a mixture is in state X only a tiny seed is needed because it’s a one way conversion. People have a reason to install app Y, and no real need to use app X over app Y but they do have a reason to use app Y over app X.
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> Today you have WhatsApp and Signal. 95% of your friends are on WhatsApp and 5% are on Signal.
I asked google:
I know this is not completely central to your point, but it does speak to a part of what you're saying in that the choices are typically not binary.