Comment by 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.
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.
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.
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.
> the segment of population in your country that doesn’t care about WhatsApp
No such thing exists. At best you have people such as myself who care about alternatives. Those too have WhatsApp installed.
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It doesn't matter what will be dominant in 10 years. What matters for phones being bought today is what's dominant today.
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.
> we are asking about what happens when a new phone shows up without it
Nobody buys it.
Do Linux phones have access to WhatsApp? If not, there is no point. It will be a perfectly good mobile computer but it will never actually replace the one in my pocket. And that's coming from a programmer who loves Linux. Imagine the utter disdain normal people would have for a phone that doesn't even run WhatsApp.
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