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Comment by ploum | Hacker News Reader

Maybe because most of the initial success was before Facebook bought Whatsapp. Until recently, lot of people were ignoring that their whatsapp was part of facebook (but those people were also using facebook messenger anyway).

Germany and Switzerland have some exotic secure messengers that were quite popular (and may still be) like threema.

There was also some quite suprizing stuff. My inlaws were, until recently, using Viber. They didn’t know why (none of them are computer people). It was wild to me to discover a chat app I never heard off in a circle of people completely outside of tech.

Anyway, the only longterm solution is an open standard. Propably XMPP. Or email after all (it works, look at delta chat).

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Much as I would love an open standard to win here, their track record has not been great with respect to messaging. If someone (looking at you, Google) were to jump on board with one, that could change stuff.

But to be fair, most consumers aren't going to care about an open standard directly; they'll care about finding and chatting with their friends. An open standard is a great way to get there when it works, but, for example, WhatApp being a de facto standard in much of the world accomplishes the same thing in those regions.

> If someone (looking at you, Google) were to jump on board with one, that could change stuff.

Google jumped on jabber years ago, then jumped off.

> Maybe because most of the initial success was before Facebook bought Whatsapp.

I guess. But it doesn't really explain why it continues to be so popular, to the extent that even on forums like this (where well-grounded skepticism of big tech companies like Facebook is generally taken for granted) you have Europeans acting like Americans are backwards fools for not wanting to jump into bed with Facebook.

It is on every persons phone, it is the defacto standard. There was a big push about two years back by many people to change application when Whatsapp's privacy policy was changing and many pushed telegram and signal. The two or three of my friends, who left and held out, have now reinstalled Whatsapp. There's simply no easy way for them to speak to everyone else. People are reluctant to text and won't bother installing another application. (BTW this was in Africa.)

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