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by chronid 144 days ago
Not bizarre at all. Many EU countries mobile users have "prepaid" SIMs. Whatsapp came at the perfect moment - mobile operators were starting to offer decently priced data plans but were also still very stingy with SMS (which was a bit of a cash cow for them, infra costs were very low) and essentially never added at the time advanced features (like MMS) to any prepaid plan ever. Many of these operators never really recovered from becoming dumb pipes.

Now the network effects have set in and it's hard to remove "naturally" WhatsApp, combined with the rise of VoIP spam callers which operators are too happy to tolerate (like they tolerated things like premium ringtones and numbers until they were forced not to)
2 comments
mullingitover 143 days ago
> VoIP spam callers which operators are too happy to tolerate

The fact that this still hasn't been solved in the year 2026 makes me wish nothing but bankruptcy on the entire legacy POTS system. Burn it all to the ground.

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shiroiuma 143 days ago
>Whatsapp came at the perfect moment - mobile operators were starting to offer decently priced data plans but were also still very stingy with SMS (which was a bit of a cash cow for them, infra costs were very low) and essentially never added at the time advanced features (like MMS) to any prepaid plan ever.

Right, this explains the history of why Europeans (and others) don't use SMS any more and use chat apps, namely WhatsApp. But still, that was many years ago, and there are many other (and better) chat apps out there now. The EU has been agitating a lot against US tech dominance, but they seem stuck on WhatsApp from Meta; they should have been moving to something else a long time ago.

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chronid 143 days ago
I don't think the dependency from Whatsapp (it's arguable other apps are "better" or not and on which axis) is critical. WA has alternatives (up to "no app at all" thanks to RCS).

The real issue with US tech dominance is B2B (i.e. Microsoft)

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elsjaako 143 days ago
In my experience most people have at least one other chat app installed. Signal, Telegram, Facebook (I think there's a built in messenger), discord, and snapchat are all common. It's just that practically everyone has Whatsapp, so that's the common denominator.
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RuggedPineapple 141 days ago
Not only does Facebook have Messenger, but it's actually a (pretty) good privacy option. It went full on default end-to-end encrypted a couple years ago. Telegram doesn't do that, you have to jump through some hoops. Signal does but it's honestly pretty niche. Everyone from your grandma to your kids has Facebook though and somehow Zuckerberg decided his data-Hoover shouldn't extend to everyone's conversations. It's surprisingly good.
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