The regional limit makes it pretty much useless. The only reason I keep a whatsapp account is to stay in touch with my family in law and a few relatives who live in another continent.
In countries where SMS isn't as widespread as it is in the US, the use of WhatsApp is much more common.
I live in one of those countries, and I don't think I've ever had to use it to communicate with someone on another continent. I think most of its use is simply local, for your community or friend group.
The downside for me is basically the lack of appeal for a non-tech user (like my parents) to voluntarily want to stop using an app they've been using for, what, 10-12 years? It’s not that big of a deal; everyone uses Instagram or Facebook (maybe)... WhatsApp is definitely going to make the process difficult, too.
Whatsapp is more popular in the US than you'd think. Probably due to a large immigrant population. I'm in several groups that use the channels feature to organize things like soccer, game nights etc. Most people with family abroad use Whatsapp, and that's a huge portion of the US.
I belong to two Toastmasters groups. One is majority non-immigrant American/caucasian, one is majority immigrant (from India, Pakistan, etc). The first one does club communication primarily via email. The second does club communication exclusively thru WhatsApp.
It's an interesting divide.
I do have some Caucasian friends who use WhatsApp. One stopped using it when FB purchased it, which I can respect. Most people I know in the states though just use iMessage or signal.
Here in EU even the 5 €/month phone plans have unlimited SMS. As soon as you want to talk to someone without Whatsapp, you need to figure out which other apps they're on. Completely useless compared to SMS
Have you considered that the EU isn't one country?
It is not unusual for there to be hosting or intermediate storage of images and other files, and from the phone you may tap a link or something to download/access that file, instead of having it automatically download and appear immediately, due to bandwidth and resource constraints.
In France, I'm "charged" for MMS, too. But that's actually considered "data", so it's deducted from the "internet" envelope which is quite generous (at least for my needs: I have multiple dozens of GB for under 10 € a month, of which I only ever went above 10 when backing up photos during a vacation with no wifi).
Yes, but there are also plenty of countries where mobile data or even smartphones aren't nearly as universal as they might be in the places where most people use whatsapp. There, people use mostly SMS and phone calls. Whatsapp and the like are the thing you use when SMS/calls would be too expensive, so international.
Both of these exist, as do middle grounds between them.
I'm in only one WhatsApp group with someone local, everyone else in my chats is from abroad. Yet I'm from a country with dirt cheap data and nearly universal smartphone ownership. People just don't use WA here for whatever reason. But drive an hour across the border and suddenly everyone is on WhatsApp.
depends where; in France you can get unlimited SMS/MMS/calls, plus 350Go of data, for 20€/month [0]. it's surprising the market hasn't developed likewise in other (European) countries; I (genuinely) wonder why − perhaps legal issues of some sort?
edit: okay, sending MMS isn't always free, depends on the countries[1]. still free for USA, Europe, Canada, etc.
I think it’s more historical at this point. 20 years ago SMS was expensive in Europe as we had cheap plans and expensive calls/texts vs US which had expensive plans but free calls/texts. That made things like WhatsApp take off in Europe while Americans would just SMS.
(Although most Americans have iPhones so just transparently avoid SMS for most of their conversations.)
There is no in the EU here. I had unlimited SMS in a sub 20€ plan more than a decade ago in France. I now have unlimited sms, unlimited calls and unlimited data in a sub 15€ plan.
I still only use WhatsApp because it’s a lot better than sms.
All the B2C services I work with are sending SMS to my phone. Not RCS, not iMessage: they are sending SMS messages.
All the MFA providers, such as Twilio and Okta, are sending SMS.
All the political campaign spammers are sending SMS.
All the reminders for appointments and bills are sending SMS.
All the notifications for apps where Push isn't good enough: they're sending SMS.
If user-to-user communication is using iMessage then that is fine. I have noticed that only about 2 of my human contacts use RCS, and at least 2 of them are using iPhones and not Androids for it. So that's some anecdata for ya!
It all depends on age group in my experience. My friends all a bit older than me prefer Messenger for everything. My friends all younger than me prefer Discord. I think my parents and their generation use iMessage, but I use WhatsApp with them. My generation used to use snapchat a lot, I think, but I never got on that boat.
That's interesting; I have and use discord myself (owner of a 300+ member server for my WoW guild), but I've never really considered it a messaging app in the same way I do iMessage, WhatsApp, and so on. I think because everyone is pseudo anonymous, it's more like social media to me. Plus I've got the phone numbers and iMessage groups for close friends I've made over discord.
Given its popularity among gamers of all nationalities, I wonder where discord stacks up in relation to the EU's DMA?
Discord is popping up as shadow IT in some places. Because of all the server admin stuff (bot APIs, Github bots, pretty advanced RBAC etc), it's basically "Slack but for free, and without the annoying SSO."
That sounds like my personal hell lol. Slack for free without the SSO, sure, but also Slack with constant annoying Nitro upsells and flashy gamer bullshit.
(I just really don't like Discord and I'm bitter that it's what my guild de facto has to use because it's what gamers have standardized on.)
Being pseudonymous doesn't prevent you from using it to contact people you actually know offline. I used Steam to talk with my group members about a project in college a couple times. Other times I used Google chat/talk/whatever it was called at the time (embedded in the browser inbox). I had a flip phone at the time, so pretty much anything I could use on desktop was easier.
I just mean I've never thought to put it in the same category as iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. Like if the EU is going to regulate messaging apps, I wouldn't have thought to lump Discord or Steam chat in there with those other ones. But, honestly, why shouldn't they?
Yeah I hate SMS. I don't want my carrier to be involved in the content of my communications. Also I normally use the computer when at home, no point using a tiny mobile device obviously.
I don't use Google or Apple accounts either so RCS is out too. WhatsApp is meta now unfortunately but for historical reasons there's no avoiding it here.
I use WhatsApp and Telegram pretty much exclusively (telegram more for group chats)
Sounds like an easy fix. Europe just has to convince the rest of the world to ditch the 15 year old popular US apps ingrained in pop culture and with network effects, and have them switch to their own EU made apps, this way we can all communicate together. :hugs: Until then, let's keep chatting on $US_APP so we can debate on how we're gonna achieve that switch.
Not sure whether you would call this technical, but the difficulty lies in allowing third party access and still prevent spam.
The reason Whatsapp won out over competing services in the first place (over here at least) was that they managed to be both free and relatively spam free. All free alternatives quickly got subsumed by spam (even non-free SMS has a spam problem nowadays).
Here's EU telling Microsoft how to conduct business globally, back in 2004 - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/ms-s... - 'help rivals connect their products to the Windows operating system.' does not mean 'EU rivals', but any 'rivals', outside of the EU as well.
'Intel v Commission (C-413/14 P, 2017)' is another case where EU Antitrust explicitly punished global conduct outside of the EU.
Right now, with exception of antitrust, EU laws only incidentally affect global conduct, e.g. once a business is compliant with GDPR, it's often too costly to restrict compliance just to the EU.
Nothing stops that from changing. EU absolutely can make a law that obliges e.g. chat app providers to either apply EU privacy standards globally or face bans/fines/seizure of their EU operations.
A probable implementation is that you bootstrap the initial key exchange using web PKI (if you want to talk to Alice@example.com then your client makes a TLS connection to example.com and asks for Alice's public key) and thereafter you use something like the Signal ratchet thing.
There's one. It's Signal. I keep telling people to use it and they keep not, because people are less likely to do things if they've been told they should do them.
To add a datapoint I can share mine: it's me who would be in a position to bootstrap the change in my circles, but I wouldn't use or recommend Signal as Whatsapp replacement until the core features are on parity, including history backups, which have always been a lagging userstory for Signal.
I think they have different (and somewhat opposing, even) targets, Signal wants to be extremely privacy protecting, and it's a disservice to their goals to sell them as a replacement for WhatsApp, because they're not.
Signal is so much worse than WhatsApp from a UX perspective. Backup sync forces you to allow background permissions (WhatsApp doesn't), you have to set and get nagged to enter a PIN every few weeks (WhatsApp doesn't), there's no transcription for audio messages (WhatsApp has that for some languages), the desktop app loses its connection if you don't open it ever few weeks (WhatsApp works fine), etc.
You literally mention 2 of the biggest whatsapp competitor and you have audacity to says "Nobody has even bothered to make an app that stands toe-to-toe with WhatsApp"
Signal allows you to do local chat export for backup, as opposed to WhatsApp (which only allows backup to Google account on android). That's actually my biggest complaint against WhatsApp and Viber: why don't you allow local backup, or backup to something I control?
Correction, in case you're interested: Whatsapp does (and has always done) allow local file backups. I know because they are just there on the storage:
Android/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/Backups/
I also know because for many years I was VERY cloud-averse so for several iterations of smartphone purchases I did migrate my chat backups between phones (plain copy-paste of files with a computer) without issues.
There are alternatives but waaaay too many already. Some will say Signal, others matrix, xmpp, jami, deltachat, olvid, simplex, briar, tox,...there is a new one every couple of months but none everbody can agree on.
The sad part is we were halfway there with XMPP 2 decades ago when both google and facebook were interoperable with it.
I have lately been telling people whatsapp is from facebook (meta means nothing to them) and now they are looking for alternatives. Unfortunately, there isn't really much european/eu (never heard of birdychat though). It does show though it is not hard to get some people to switch; they have groups on whatsapp and use it for nothing else; these are people they chat with often so they only need to switch those and then whatsapp can go.
I find Telegram the best app; its faster and easier than the rest I find. The default no e2e sucks so cannot use it for everything, but having everything immediately ready and working on all devices makes it very nice. When you buy a new one, immediately all is there. Yes, obviously I am aware that can only be because no e2e, but normies and non normies alike seem to really hate the whatsapp, and even more, signal losing all your messages because backup/restore is too annoying. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but if someone manages to make more that experience... I mean turn it around; make e2e the default but allow people to create groups or 1-1 without e2e if they want (knowing then downsides and upsides of that).
I didn't say Signal did not and obviously Telegram can make it work because they do have it if you switch it on per chat. So what do you mean?
Edit: I guess you are from Ukraine? That is valid, the CEO is fishy. I did say I would not recommend it, I said it is the only performant and easy to use chat app I know off. That was a user perspective thing and more the hope of people pointing out 'no you fool here is another good one'. Definitely not Signal, slow and unfriendly. Whatsapp a little better, but Meta. Next.
>Telegram can make it work because they do have it if you switch it on per chat
You can't enable 1:1 secret chat from your desktop client. The secret chat doesn't appear on desktop when you enable it on your phone. So you're forced to drop end-to-end encryption if you want interoperability between phone and desktop clients. You can't enable secret chats for group chats on any client. The company isn't working to make secret chats actually usable.
>I guess you are from Ukraine?
Nope.
>Definitely not Signal, slow and unfriendly
The thing is, friendly apps are apps that respect your human right to privacy. There's a term for applications that appear to do something useful while doing something against the user's interests without them knowing: A Trojan Horse. Which is a malware classification.
When you view it through that lens, Telegram is the unfriendliest app out there outside completely unencrypted messengers like Palringo (at least used to be the case), where anyone can read your message from the cable with WireShark.
It's not really about that but more that other countries start regulating the same way as WhatsApp and that way not all people would switch to these apps but they would have the opportunity to use it and keep talking with their friends and family
> Sounds like an easy fix. Europe just has to convince the rest of the world to ditch the 15 year old popular US apps ingrained in pop culture and with network effects, and have them switch to their own EU made apps
Are you on some funny medication or something? ROTFL.
I'm originally from the US, but where I live now, whatsapp functionally replaced email for a lot of different types of communication (that would be an email in the US). Recruiters text me on whatsapp about jobs, I can ask for a prescription renewal through it, and I get support from everything ranging from a government agency to customer support for things from businesses, ect.
> The regional limit makes it pretty much useless. The only reason I keep a whatsapp account is to stay in touch with my family in law and a few relatives who live in another continent.
… useless FOR YOU. not useless overall. its just that you in your limited use case cannot use it.
It's not really the "overseas" usecase that is the sticking point for many businesses.
Does your business in Spain ever need to message Brits who are there on holiday? Does your business in Greece ever have customers who drive across the border from Albania?
We live in a global world and this is super common nowadays. In my own family 2 out of 3 sibling are married with someone who was born in a different continent, one in Asia, the other in Latin America.
And we both met them here in Europe.
People are so welcoming in latin america that when you marry someone, you literally marry the whole extended family. After just a handful of years is not like my partner's aunts and cousins are strangers to me. I can contact them anytime for advice on a topic related to their work/career field and they will do so about mine.
Add to that some cousins and friends who moved overseas and I have many regular contacts that live more than 10000km away from me.
I'm not sure what they mean by "in the region", but my case is even more extreme, as pretty much the only time I'm forced to use whatsapp is when I'm travelling and need to communicate with all sorts of hosts who annoyingly expect me to have whatsapp. After returning home I always delete it.
So I am usually "in the region" with those guys, but since "region" probably means "similar phone number" it will be useless to me too.
Ukraine isn't in the EU, neither is Swicerland, Norway or, most famously, the UK. All of these are on the European continent, all of these have citizens living right near a border with an EU country and regularly having to communicate with the EU side.
I live in one of those countries, and I don't think I've ever had to use it to communicate with someone on another continent. I think most of its use is simply local, for your community or friend group.
The downside for me is basically the lack of appeal for a non-tech user (like my parents) to voluntarily want to stop using an app they've been using for, what, 10-12 years? It’s not that big of a deal; everyone uses Instagram or Facebook (maybe)... WhatsApp is definitely going to make the process difficult, too.