| I think you're reaching about about Switzerland being the problem here. > Threema was launched in 2013 > WhatsApp was bought by Facebook in 2014 So a year after Threema's launch, it was competing with a multi-billion dollar global corporation which already had a user count in the billions. > Signal to launch an iOS app in 2014 Signal is free (which a lot of casual users care about) and open-source (which a lot of privacy/security-conscious users care about). > Why? I'm guessing because the founders lacked the experience or the right people to guide them from startup into massive growth [...] sadly Switzerland lacks the people with that kind of experience. Can't the same be said of other European tech startups like Spotify and Skype? Plus, ProtonMail, another startup in a similar space, based in Switzerland, has managed to become basically "the" secure email provider. I think the real story here is much simpler: Threema is a small company and came into a competitive space where it had to compete on multiple fronts: tech giants on one, open-source on the other. As a paid _messaging_ app, it had a difficult future ahead of it whatever it did, no matter where it was based. And for Switzerland in general, remember that it's a small country that has fewer than 9M people. Don't take the absence of unicorns to indicate that they're impossible. EDIT: One more thing that occurred to me - what's the alternative? I'd suggest that a good part of the reason why Threema got the success it did in the German-speaking world was that it was from Switzerland. If it came from say the US, I suspect it wouldn't be trusted. |
- Free for first year.
- Then $1 per year.
The idea is, if you aren't using the app, then don't pay for it, but if you are, you will pay for it.