[anyfoo]

https://twitter.com/martinlewerentz/status/11767946856937144...

I don't know anything about the source, but on the bottom left I can see it says "Source: Facebook internal [something]". Various other searches corroborate similar numbers. There are about 80 Million people in Germany, so this is substantial.

It also matches my (anecdotical, yes) experience of pretty much all my friends and family in Germany using WhatsApp, and me having done so as well before I moved to the US. I remember the impetus being that at that time (long before they were acquired by Facebook), SMS were expensive in Germany, but WhatsApp over data was (effectively) "free". I believe this to be the main reason why WhatsApp took hold in many countries, while it didn't so much in others (e.g. the US, where I think individual SMS were always free, but not sure).

Nowadays, some of my folks in Germany at least use Signal or iMessage.

[lawl]

Afaik this applies exactly like this to most of/all of europe.

I still pay $0.15 per sms. Ok i'm on a prepaid plan but still, that's ridiculous. And my separate (very slow, but more than good enough for HN, voip etc.) mobile internet only sim is $4/month. Of of course with signal that is effectively almost a flatrate for all calls and texts.

[Dah00n]

I don't know where you are at but here in Denmark I have unlimited/free SMS and using Netflixs test servers (Fast) I get 80mbit/s right now, inside my house out in the country.

Many I know have basically zero data in their plan as they don't need it for anything so there's no way WhatsApp or FB messenger can be cheaper than SMS. I think the price with only 1gb data and free SMS/MMS is something like $6.

[anyfoo]

I mean, by now several people have pretty much told you that things were and are different in other (and larger) parts of Europe than they seem to be in Denmark, likely having a big effect on the initial proliferation of WhatsApp and potentially other messengers.