WhatsApp only has 500m daily average users worldwide, while being installed on 2 billion phones. Do you expect it to maintain it’s #2 spot for 10 years? None of them have had a run that long.
Does it matter? The fact is pretty much everyone in my country uses WhatsApp. There is no getting away from it. It's so absurdly important ISPs have stopped metering WhatsApp traffic. A phone that doesn't run WhatsApp is a literal paperweight.
Mobile telephony is irrelevant: 98% of incoming calls are automated marketing/scam calls, the rest are people who couldn't call me on WhatsApp for some reason. It gets to the point I wish I could turn it off. SMS is irrelevant: it's mostly 2FA codes, companies using it as a notifications system and phishing.
It matters because the segment of population in your country that doesn’t care about WhatsApp is a nucleus of adoption for both the next messaging app and a phone without WhatsApp. Facebook is already hedging it’s bets by owning and promoting the next most popular messaging app.
So what? Those people are essentially ostracized. They don't matter, they never mattered. Also, I guarantee you they still care about WhatsApp, even if the only thing they do is seethe about how dominant it is. I hate Facebook and its data collection yet look at me talking about WhatsApp. I'm actually happy that the people of my country are using something so secure. At least it has end-to-end encryption just like Signal.
Try living in a country where nobody asks girls for their phone number anymore. They ask them for their WhatsApp. Phone numbers are just an old idiotic thing you need to put into your contacts database to get the person to show up in WhatsApp. The WhatsApp word itself has become part of the language as a synonym for message, just like the Google verb has become a synonym for search in the anglosphere. People even compressed it into "zap" to make it easier to say. "I gotta go but I'll send you a zap later." Want to order some food? You want the restaurant's WhatsApp. Those that don't have a WhatsApp contact are losing so much money it's not even funny because it's better than every single food app out there. First day in college? The very first thing you want to do is join your class's WhatsApp group, or make one if it doesn't exist. Actually, you'll want to make two: one with your professors and another without. If you don't do this, you'll be so hopelessly out of the loop you might as well quit. I had classmates who barely had money to buy a cheap phone being forced to do so because they couldn't keep up with classes otherwise. Their phones had literally a single app and that app was WhatsApp.
WhatsApp once refused to comply with a court order to decrypt user messages during a child abuse investigation. It was impossible to comply because they didn't have the end-to-end encryption keys to begin with. The judge got mad and blocked WhatsApp nation-wide at the ISP level as punishment. You would not believe the disruption and outrage this caused. I remember teaching at least 10 friends how to bypass the block with VPNs. Not only was it an ineffective and unpopular measure, it lasted only a couple days before a higher authority undid the judge's decision. In my country, judges are perceived as gods who can do literally anything they want, but WhatsApp is so important it put some much needed humility into them. The judge wasn't punishing WhatsApp, she was punishing every citizen of my country by denying them access to such a vital tool. WhatsApp is so important they replied to the fucking judge in english instead of portuguese. I still remember the judge's pissed off face when she talked about that during a media interview. The nerve, right?
It is similar in the UK as well regarding WhatsApp. Not quite to the extreme you describe, but WhatsApp has 100% replaced SMS. No one uses SMS. It is all WhatsApp. People don't talk about texting they say "I'll WhatsApp you." If you join a new social circle, whether it's personal or professional, the first thing is to be added to the WhatsApp group.
The only thing I'll say about the security aspect though is the on-by-default cloud backups make the E2EE a red herring. Even if you turn it off on your own phone, it is almost certain the person you are talking to has it on. And if you turn it off it nags you to turn it back on after each update, most users will just do it to make the nagging go away, and FB know that.
My family lives mostly in the UK. None of them use Whatsapp. They still use SMS for random messaging, and they use Telegram for coordinated messaging. They range in age from 30 to 78. WhatsApp might be dominant, but "No one uses SMS" is almost certainly an overstatement.
Some people, especially those who have more international contacts, will prefer to use Telegram over WhatsApp sure. It is rare to find anyone under the age of 60 who uses SMS as their primary method of communication in 2021 though. The number of SMS messages sent in the UK has dropped by over 100 billion in the past slightly-under-a-decade.[1]
The page you linked says there were 48.68 billion SMS in 2020. Averaged across the population, that's on the order of 800-900 messages per person per year. Even if the actual SMS usage demographics skews older (quite likely), it's still likely that most people send at least one text per day, maybe more.
Given that the original claim was that "no-one uses SMS anymore", I think that's still demonstrably false. Your milder claim - "rare to find anyone under 60 who uses SMS as their primary messaging system" - seems likely to be true.
You missed out some vital context from the source of that statistic:
> The number of outgoing SMS and MMS messages sent in the United Kingdom (UK) fell to 48.68 billion in 2020, from a peak of 150.83 billion in 2012.
> The fall in the number of SMS and MMS messages sent over mobile networks in the UK, coincides with a surge in popularity of apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Globally, WhatsApp added 1.3 billion monthly active users from April 2013 to December 2017, replacing the need for sending SMS messages for many users.
Trust me, yeah someone's grandparents who don't own smartphones might use SMS, but the vast majority of the population does not. The stats are right there.
Also note that number of SMS messages sent is not the same as number of people using SMS as a form of communication. Most texts are sent by bots either for legit things like 2FA codes or less legit things like phishing.
We’re talking 2 texts per person, someone is sending a lot and junk isn’t enough to hit those numbers. Also, 2 factor identification is still usage.
Now it might not on top by number of messages even if it’s close, but that’s a different question. If you’re going to pick one and only one service to use then texting makes you reachable by the widest possible audience demonstrating it’s still #1 by adoption.
Haiti here. WhatsApp took off because SMS was still not free and the providers were rent seeking. It was either send 10 sms or have 50mb for exchanging messages. People even got to learn how to share the binary when their Play store got outdated. Phone call is still used a lot because 3g networks reception varies and people still buy feature phones. But SMS is gone and a lot of people disabled notifications for it as it’s only used for ads by the provider (and it was a big issue with the government tried to run health campaigns there). The next one is telegram for movies and TV shows sharing (no theater here). So yeah, WhatsApp has a lot of appeal here and no one care about privacy.
Yeah. SMS is not free here either. Probably. I don't even know, nobody uses it anymore. I do remember friends describing "plans" that included some number of free messages or whatever. I also remember the mobile service providers absolutely seething about WhatsApp. They lobbied the government for protectionism against the app that was disrupting their shitty services. Hilarious and sad at the same time. Wish these legacy corporations would just get wiped off the face of this earth so that humanity can make some actual progress instead of keeping these parasites on life support.
> But SMS is gone and a lot of people disabled notifications for it as it’s only used for ads by the provider (and it was a big issue with the government tried to run health campaigns there).
My mobile carrier also thinks it's acceptable to send me ads via SMS. The very first time they did this, I disabled all SMS notifications forever. The government also tried to send me COVID-19 related messages but I only saw them years later when I randomly decided to clean up my SMS inbox.
They have only themselves to blame, really. If they wanted a clean communications channel, they should not have allowed companies to pollute it with an infinite amount of worthless noise. Nobody wants to be subjected to advertising.
The so what is dominance gets eroded at the margins. It’s not the 99% who matter it’s all about what a tiny majority who actually care do everyone that really wants to talk to them will install the app that lets them. Then those people are suddenly spending time on another platform and it snowballs.
What’s really interesting is you essentially need isolation to get a steady state dominance by any one platform, but nobody is actually isolated any more. New platforms win not by slowly growing 5 or 10% a year but by crazy exponential curves where 30% more people install in a single month.
Having said that I don’t mean to suggest WhatsApp is going to die in Brazil tomorrow. Their currently is no real need to move right now.
It doesn’t matter if it’s close to 100% that’s not enough. There’s a huge difference between a solution with and without a seed crystal and the gap is plenty large for the next platform to win and win surprisingly quickly.
But we aren’t really talking about today we are asking about what happens when a new phone shows up without it. You don’t need to sell to everyone on day one they just need to erode dominance fast enough that it doesn’t stop adoption.
> we are asking about what happens when a new phone shows up without it
Nobody buys it.
Do Linux phones have access to WhatsApp? If not, there is no point. It will be a perfectly good mobile computer but it will never actually replace the one in my pocket. And that's coming from a programmer who loves Linux. Imagine the utter disdain normal people would have for a phone that doesn't even run WhatsApp.
Whatsapp used to be openly hostile against efforts for providing native client applications even for platforms they never plan to support themselves. Going as far as effectively attacking open source project developers working the clients - for an example see: https://reviewjolla.blogspot.com/2014/10/got-banned-in-whats...
Some sort of undefined behavior or possibly some per build random key that triggers imposter warning if the third party app fails to send the correct key ?
In any case totally evil behavior from their side. Its already bad enough they run totally proprietary centralized service with no public API & ignore any non-mainstream mobile platforms. But when they start banning users of third party clients on those platforms and go after third party client developers with presumably legal treats - that's pure evil, no way around it.
A Linux phone could run WhatsApp if the Linux distro was implemented in such a way that it could run Android apps (remember Android is basically just a runtime on top of the Linux kernel) and since AOSP is FOSS this is very doable and legal.
How commercially successful it'd be is still a different story, but it could run WhatsApp.
WhatsApp has no motivation to use SafetyNet. For one thing plenty of their users use cheap Chinese phones that aren't actually Google certified (but come with the Play Store anyway) and they know this full well from their analytics.
For another, SafetyNet is used primarily for DRM on streaming services and for banking or other financial apps. Absolutely no messenger uses it that I am aware of (unless you count Snapchat as a "messenger" but that's literally it).
Every FB owned app runs fine on Android devices that fail SafetyNet. No reason to believe that'll change because where's the benefit for FB?
