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Comment by wutbrodo | Hacker News Reader

Yea I think the US is definitely an outlier there; Out of the couple dozen countries I've visited recently outside of the US, Whatsapp seems like hands-down the most popular messaging app (whereas in the US, almost no one I know uses it unless they're in frequent contact with a non-trivial number of foreigners).

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A major difference is that in the US text messages and MMS are usually free, so there's not a lot of pressure to move to a different communication medium. In lots of other countries you pay several cents for each individual text message and MMS cost several tens of cents. And this is for domestic messages. With international messages (which you often use because you're country is likely to be much smaller than the US) the costs are often insane and can reach more than a dollar per message. Basically providers in those countries stopped competing with apps like Whatsapp. They still offer a texting service, but they're not trying to get someone to use it, because they already lost the battle.

SMS' can be free in a lot of European countries, the main difference is that MMS didn't really take off in Europe as much as it did in the US so they usually cost more. Also since people weren't that attached to MMS, it was easy to 'replace'

For most of the 2000's MMS didn't work until you went into settings and entered an MMS gateway address or something. Which nobody did since they never used MMS anyway.

At least here in the UK SMS' are usually free (or very cheap) but whatsapp is popular since it's very easy to use, allows group chats/voice messages and works well when the connection isn't great. But mostly because it works on virtually every platform (even some feature phones), so you can assume that basically everyone has it.

> A major difference is that in the US text messages and MMS are usually free, so there's not a lot of pressure to move to a different communication medium.

I'm not sure that's true. At least in my sample, there are quite a few people who explicitly ask you to use some chat app instead of texting them, because they don't pay for unlimited texting.

I think a big reason for this is that in Europe people frequently move between countries, eg for school or work or vacation. This often means changing SIM cards and local phone number.

So it makes sense to use whatsapp because it's data based and you can keep the same account across SIM card changes.

That's actually a bug-feature: whatsapp is supposed to be tied to a phonenumber.

For example, take this use case: you have whatsapp with a german number. You go to italy. You get an italian sim. You get a new phone. Result: you can not use your german whatsapp. There is no way you can activate your german whatsapp account without yout german sim.

That's why you keep your original sim around (receiving an sms from abroad isn't very expensive and that's enough for re activating your account). And you can transfer your account to a different number as well.

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