[freddie_mercury]

The rest of the world isn't on WhatsApp. What a bizarre claim. Vietnam uses Zalo. Japan uses Line. Korea uses Kakaotalk. China uses WeChat. Iran is Telegram.

And in the US more people are using iMessage than SMS thanks to iPhone's 58% market share.

[hurricanepootis]

> Iran is Telegram

I don't know about you, but I personally talk with Iranians more on Whatsapp than telegram. I know the Iranian government did ban whatsapp for a while, but its still popular. I remember reading an article on here about a whatsapp leak, and it mentioned that there are over 60 million whatsapp users in Iran. Considering that Iran has a population of around 91 million, that's a huge majority of the country.

[y-c-o-m-b]

Can confirm, my family back in Iran doesn't use Telegram and haven't for quite some time. They're all on WhatsApp. Telegram seemed to be popular in Iran during the Whatsapp ban and it switched back to Whatsapp being dominant it seems. Which is very annoying to me because I loathe Meta and don't use any of their products.

[hurricanepootis]

If only Signal wasn't blocked/banned in Iran without a proxy...

[lawgimenez]

The other countries not mentioned are on Facebook's Messenger.

[piva00]

I think Germany has a high amount of users on Signal, it's quite interesting seeing the stats about messaging apps in different countries, it's very fractured internationally while being very consistent inside borders.

I for one fucking hate that most of Sweden uses FB Messenger, it's the clunkiest of them all, and since I don't like using it all I constantly miss important messages from friends from not having the app installed and checking Facebook once in a blue moon :/

[xethos]

This is probably a lot more work than you're willing to put in, but the Facebook Messenger bridge for Matrix has actually been reliable, set'n'forget, and headache-free for me, whenever I have to use it for Marketplace.

I wouldn't otherwise mention it, but this is one of the few sites where "Stand up your own messaging server" isn't a completely insane suggestion.

[reddalo]

>it's very fractured internationally while being very consistent inside borders

I think it's caused by the network effect [1].

>I for one fucking hate that most of Sweden uses FB Messenger

I agree. Denmark is the same, everybody uses FB Messenger or, even worse, Snapchat.

And don't even get me started on payment systems: Sweden has Swish, Denmark has MobilePay, Italy has Satispay, etc. It's completely fractured and it's so annyoing when travelling across the EU.

At least there's a new European system called Wero [2], I wonder if it's going to help fixing this situation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

[2] https://wero-wallet.eu/

[karel-3d]

That's not dominant anywhere right now. Facebook now somehow merged it back to the main app... again.

[veeti]

Check India and Indonesia next, there's quite a lot of WA users for you.

[freddie_mercury]

Nobody claimed there weren't a lot of WhatsApp users.

[mmmlinux]

always has been. some countries used AIM, Others Yahoo messenger, others MSN.