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Comment by matheusmoreira

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.

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.

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matheusmoreira

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Retric  4 years ago

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.

  • matheusmoreira  4 years ago

    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.

    • Retric  4 years ago

      It matters because the segment of population in your country that doesn’t care about WhatsApp is a nucleus of adoption for both the next messaging app and a phone without WhatsApp. Facebook is already hedging it’s bets by owning and promoting the next most popular messaging app.

      18 replies →

  • josephcsible  4 years ago

    It doesn't matter what will be dominant in 10 years. What matters for phones being bought today is what's dominant today.

    • Retric  4 years ago

      But we aren’t really talking about today we are asking about what happens when a new phone shows up without it. You don’t need to sell to everyone on day one they just need to erode dominance fast enough that it doesn’t stop adoption.

      8 replies →