← Back to context

Comment by Retric

4 years ago

WhatsApp isn’t installed on 100% of phones in any country, try to look at actual statistics before making such bold claims.

16 comments

Retric

Reply
matheusmoreira  4 years ago

So what? Those people are essentially ostracized. They don't matter, they never mattered. Also, I guarantee you they still care about WhatsApp, even if the only thing they do is seethe about how dominant it is. I hate Facebook and its data collection yet look at me talking about WhatsApp. I'm actually happy that the people of my country are using something so secure. At least it has end-to-end encryption just like Signal.

Try living in a country where nobody asks girls for their phone number anymore. They ask them for their WhatsApp. Phone numbers are just an old idiotic thing you need to put into your contacts database to get the person to show up in WhatsApp. The WhatsApp word itself has become part of the language as a synonym for message, just like the Google verb has become a synonym for search in the anglosphere. People even compressed it into "zap" to make it easier to say. "I gotta go but I'll send you a zap later." Want to order some food? You want the restaurant's WhatsApp. Those that don't have a WhatsApp contact are losing so much money it's not even funny because it's better than every single food app out there. First day in college? The very first thing you want to do is join your class's WhatsApp group, or make one if it doesn't exist. Actually, you'll want to make two: one with your professors and another without. If you don't do this, you'll be so hopelessly out of the loop you might as well quit. I had classmates who barely had money to buy a cheap phone being forced to do so because they couldn't keep up with classes otherwise. Their phones had literally a single app and that app was WhatsApp.

WhatsApp once refused to comply with a court order to decrypt user messages during a child abuse investigation. It was impossible to comply because they didn't have the end-to-end encryption keys to begin with. The judge got mad and blocked WhatsApp nation-wide at the ISP level as punishment. You would not believe the disruption and outrage this caused. I remember teaching at least 10 friends how to bypass the block with VPNs. Not only was it an ineffective and unpopular measure, it lasted only a couple days before a higher authority undid the judge's decision. In my country, judges are perceived as gods who can do literally anything they want, but WhatsApp is so important it put some much needed humility into them. The judge wasn't punishing WhatsApp, she was punishing every citizen of my country by denying them access to such a vital tool. WhatsApp is so important they replied to the fucking judge in english instead of portuguese. I still remember the judge's pissed off face when she talked about that during a media interview. The nerve, right?

  • 2cb  4 years ago

    It is similar in the UK as well regarding WhatsApp. Not quite to the extreme you describe, but WhatsApp has 100% replaced SMS. No one uses SMS. It is all WhatsApp. People don't talk about texting they say "I'll WhatsApp you." If you join a new social circle, whether it's personal or professional, the first thing is to be added to the WhatsApp group.

    The only thing I'll say about the security aspect though is the on-by-default cloud backups make the E2EE a red herring. Even if you turn it off on your own phone, it is almost certain the person you are talking to has it on. And if you turn it off it nags you to turn it back on after each update, most users will just do it to make the nagging go away, and FB know that.

    • PaulDavisThe1st  4 years ago

      My family lives mostly in the UK. None of them use Whatsapp. They still use SMS for random messaging, and they use Telegram for coordinated messaging. They range in age from 30 to 78. WhatsApp might be dominant, but "No one uses SMS" is almost certainly an overstatement.

      2 replies →

  • skydhash  4 years ago

    Haiti here. WhatsApp took off because SMS was still not free and the providers were rent seeking. It was either send 10 sms or have 50mb for exchanging messages. People even got to learn how to share the binary when their Play store got outdated. Phone call is still used a lot because 3g networks reception varies and people still buy feature phones. But SMS is gone and a lot of people disabled notifications for it as it’s only used for ads by the provider (and it was a big issue with the government tried to run health campaigns there). The next one is telegram for movies and TV shows sharing (no theater here). So yeah, WhatsApp has a lot of appeal here and no one care about privacy.

    • matheusmoreira  4 years ago

      Yeah. SMS is not free here either. Probably. I don't even know, nobody uses it anymore. I do remember friends describing "plans" that included some number of free messages or whatever. I also remember the mobile service providers absolutely seething about WhatsApp. They lobbied the government for protectionism against the app that was disrupting their shitty services. Hilarious and sad at the same time. Wish these legacy corporations would just get wiped off the face of this earth so that humanity can make some actual progress instead of keeping these parasites on life support.

      > But SMS is gone and a lot of people disabled notifications for it as it’s only used for ads by the provider (and it was a big issue with the government tried to run health campaigns there).

      My mobile carrier also thinks it's acceptable to send me ads via SMS. The very first time they did this, I disabled all SMS notifications forever. The government also tried to send me COVID-19 related messages but I only saw them years later when I randomly decided to clean up my SMS inbox.

      They have only themselves to blame, really. If they wanted a clean communications channel, they should not have allowed companies to pollute it with an infinite amount of worthless noise. Nobody wants to be subjected to advertising.

      1 reply →

  • Retric  4 years ago

    The so what is dominance gets eroded at the margins. It’s not the 99% who matter it’s all about what a tiny majority who actually care do everyone that really wants to talk to them will install the app that lets them. Then those people are suddenly spending time on another platform and it snowballs.

    What’s really interesting is you essentially need isolation to get a steady state dominance by any one platform, but nobody is actually isolated any more. New platforms win not by slowly growing 5 or 10% a year but by crazy exponential curves where 30% more people install in a single month.

    Having said that I don’t mean to suggest WhatsApp is going to die in Brazil tomorrow. Their currently is no real need to move right now.

alanlammiman  4 years ago

In Brazil it is close enough to 100%

  • Retric  4 years ago

    It doesn’t matter if it’s close to 100% that’s not enough. There’s a huge difference between a solution with and without a seed crystal and the gap is plenty large for the next platform to win and win surprisingly quickly.