Because SMS sucks, always has, for many reasons
Give me a federated XMPP based messenger with all the same features as WhatsApp and then… Well, I’ll install it but I still wouldn’t use it because nobody is using it
That is the core of the matter: everybody uses WhatsApp because everybody uses WhatsApp
My guess, because of the network effect.
I use SMS specifically because of the network effect. Almost everyone I want to communicate with has a cellphone, so all of them are capable of sending and receiving text messages. There is no need to list my installed messaging apps and compare it to theirs, we just need to exchange phone numbers.
My longest and most active conversations (chatting with my wife or my closest friends) are going to be over a more feature rich app, but if I need to set up a quick chat with 3 or 4 people, I am not going to think what messaging app we all have in common, I will just start an SMS group chat.
Bump
SMS uses cellular, WhatsApp uses internet. Internet connects you anywhere with one flat rate, cellular may charge extra per message or for international communication.
Signal is better, but everyone’s grandmother is already on WhatsApp and good luck getting them to switch
SMS uses cellular, WhatsApp uses internet.
I think that’s why OP asked about RCS as well, which is also internet but built into SMS apps.
Because the common user doesn’t know what rcs is, it is still sms on their minds.
RCS is very finicky where i live, it can disconnect and fall back to sms at any moment, even with data enabled.
Signal always sounded too good to be true. I won’t be shocked to learn it’s an NSA front I promise.
Their clients are open source, unless you are worried about the NSA being better at decryption than is currently thought possible, the only information you are giving is encrypted traffic, who you are, who you sent a message to, and if their press release are anything to go by, they are trying to muddy the waters of the identification part with moving away from phone # account creation. I’m also a proponent of xmpp for a similar reason, and I think that xmpp is the better protocol, but signal has more concessions to non techies
Deltachat and Jabber/XMPP are good decentralized/federated alternatives to Signal.
I keep hoping with this anti-American Big Tech push that Europe and other places are doing they’ll get off Meta products. But I’m also not holding my breath.
I work at a company that I strongly suspect had a very serious security breach because of Whatsapp.
During the outage, we were back to SMS and direct phone calling only. After the system was restored, back to how everything was before, caution be damned, lessons not learned.
It’s not bad enough to have that invasive application as the default means of passing information around (messages, photos, video and even audio, of all things!) on work phones, office personel has it paired to their computers, where highly sensitive programs and data is stored.
Back at the turn of the century text messages were exorbitantly priced
Which is crazy because it literally uses spare bandwidth they didn’t use (other than for the clock updates and other housekeeping) and the amount of data used is infinitesimal compared to voice or other data.
This is why it was free at first as it didn’t cost the carrier anything more. This changed quickly when they figured they could charge for it with rates going as high as 20 cents per message in the US. This lead to crazy bills like $5,000.
I remember having only 200 SMS per month and having to ration them carefully because the plans were structured in a way where ordering more resulted in a big price jump.
I was at the tail end of pagers so being able to text was normal but using a cell phone to talk was next great thing. I was always confused why people wanted to go back to texting when they could just talk.
It wasn’t until I had a phone with a physical keyboard that I finally started texting to any degree. It never made sense during the Nokia era for me because it was slow and unintuitive.
I actually agree with you, why would I want to text on an itty birth screen. Nevertheless, despite all my efforts, I can’t seem to get myself to switch to those short voice memos you can send in Signal and similar apps. My brother is a pro with those, but it just feels odd to me.
WhatsApp is free (or was it a low-cost one-time purchase? haven’t used Google Play in a long time), SMS tends to cost money.
This is my understanding. WhatsApp took off at a time and in places where SMS was expensive. Because WhatsApp used data, they could keep data usage low and allow people to message almost for free.
Nevermind past tense, my current phone plan still has me pay for SMS separately (IIRC I get 100 free SMS, after that it’s 9 cent/SMS).
Wow, after the move to messaging apps pretty much any general phone plan here has free unlimited SMS, the different plans are about the data included. Even the $8NZD ($4.60USD) per month 150MB data plan comes with unlimited SMS.
Others are mentioning price per message, but also important to remember that in the 2000-2010s outside of the United States, when traveling from country to country, you usually had to get a local SIM card for a provider in that country, During your vacation, you’d have a new number for a month when no one could contact you over normal text messages which was a problem. WhatsApp became popular so you could keep chatting with friends abroad even if your phone’s SIM card changed during your vacation.
Since most people from the United States don’t travel outside the country, and vacation time is rather limited, this wasn’t a problem for them, but for the rest of the world, a solution was needed that removed the cell carrier from the equation.
Why not Signal?
WhatsApp has been around for a few minutes more than Signal.
Not really, no. Signal was released more or less exactly a year later than WhatsApp (May 2010 vs May 2009), which, if you look at the 17 years since then, doesn’t really matter that much.
However, broad adoption rates in messaging apps are typically achieved by e. g. funny emoji sets vs. encryption, and the early versions of Signal were pretty barebone.
Maybe I should have said “what’s app gained popularity earlier”
Also “WhatsApp’s business model made it marginally easier to use because they don’t care about privacy”
Wile SMS in the US went free relatively early on, much of the rest of the world continued to charge for every individual SMS message. So data based instant messaging apps became very popular everywhere in the world that’s not the US.
Basically this. tl;dr: being free and being first exposure to mobile instant messenger.
in my south east Asian country, back then we did have bundle sms pricing, buy when the mobile internet infrastructure was getting big money from governments, WhatsApp came in at the right moment. advertising them being free (with a minimal $1 or something lifetime fee nobody bothered to pay for) and can do texting and sending images for free. compared to paying bundled prices for sms and MMS, it’s just a no-brainer.
RCS is not yet working on my carrier here in Sweden.
And since most people are already using alternative messaging apps, no one really cares.
“It gives me the complexion of a Disney princess and lets me send weird pictures of my forhead or the ceiling to my friends.” --Teenagers gleefully giving Snapchat all their personal data
Snapchat was made for dick pics
Because when Whatsapp was born, SMS were paid (and not cheaply). In my country, sending one SMS cost 0.19€ at the time and didn’t allow pics to be send. Meanwhile, with 10€ I could have 1-2GB of data that allowed for tens of thousands of messages to be sent while on mobile data and unlimited messages while I was on a wifi connection.
Its funny that thats the current situation of international phone costs. Sms and calling internationally is expensive while I can download a global(/local to the country) esim giving me data for cheap.
WhatsApp was also an independent company and worked really well compared with other apps. I remember checking alternatives like… 5 years ago and no other app was able to do video calls reliably. Since then Signal caught up and works great now but everyone is already on WhatsApp. EU was working interoperability requirements. That’s pretty much the only way to escape WhatsApp now.
Signal still doesn’t do live location sharing I don’t think?
Signal requires Google Play Services to share location so it doesn’t work for me on Graphene OS at all.
Oh. That’s the kind of annoying thing that makes people not want to switch OS.
I’ve been dealing with issues like that for around 30 years now, even since I started using Linux, so I’m used to it. You will never get 100% of features working on a alternative, open source, privacy respecting OS. If I want to share location I can copy coordinates from CoMaps or something. For live sharing there are self-hosted options.
jesus wept, why… no, it’s rhetorical, not asking why it’s just beyond stupid and dangerous to have that information at meta’s disposal.
Molly does location sharing just fine without Play Services.
They are st*pid and like to suck on the zuck
- You can curse on the Internet. Don’t self censor.
- The world used WhatsApp before Facebook bought it and network effects hold people there.
- Most people around here had mobile plans with limited sms usage and were less likely to be iPhone users, so a chat across operating systems was a necessity. That meant WhatsApp was way cheaper and could do images and videos.
That’s just objectively wrong, WA become popular long before Meta bought it, and once it was popular, people kept using it simply because everyone else also uses it.
And the reason it became popular is because SMS were relatively expensive in most of the world outside the US, wheras internet messengers require only a tiny amount of data per message, meaning even when mobile internet plans were expensive, the cost per message for an internet messengers usually still worked out to way cheaper than an SMS. Also, for a lot of people not having any mobile internet wasn’t much of an option, so if you have to pay for mobile internet anyway whether you use an internet messenger or not, then internet messaging is completely free for all intents and purposes, since you’re paying for the plan anyway, and the messaging won’t use up a noticeable amount of your data (as long as you don’t send/receive lots of media), so why would people pay for costly SMS ? And WA simply was (one of) the first mobile internet messaging apps with good features that worked well. And as soon as it started taking off, netwerk effect made it become exponentially more popular in those countries.
whatever
Very insightful
I hate WhatsApp for no other reason than it’s a Facebook product.
Meta*
No, it will never be meta to me. The only reason they changed their name Facebook is because there was so many negative connotations from their shitty business practices. I will never call them meta just like I will never call Twitter x. I also will never call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America nor will I ever call the lake lake America.
I mean, X is worse than Twitter because that’s when it became fascist.
Facebook used to at least employ some content moderation folks. Meta, likewise, went full fascist and misinformation.
The name changes provide a delineation for magnitudes worse enshitification.
I’ve had SMS messages read to me by a third party, not a cop. I’ve had transcripts of ‘private’ cell calls read back to me by a third party, not a cop.
I survived the entire lifetime of skype without having the same, and I guess I hope the same happens with whatsapp.
Could you share more about this, safely?
That definitely didn’t happen with Skype. Many, many people have saved your Skype messages.
RCS is Google locked
Google locked?
Exclusive to Google’s texting app.
Are you sure? I definitely RCS message with friends who have iPhones.
Support was added relatively recently, and a lot of people didn’t notice. I think it also used to default to off, not sure what the current default is.
RCS has been on iPhones a couple years. The recent update was encrypted RCS.
I don’t know whether the implementation is still Google, but in August I noticed RCS chats now have a “lock” icon
It was never ‘Google locked’, its an open standard developed by the GSM Association that IOS has supported since 2024.
All RCS goes through google servers, they have to approve the devices. Graphene OS and e/os can’t use RCS
That’s not true, network carriers can also run RCS backends independently of Google. Graphene OS is currently working on a new messaging app that supports RCS without Google services. Both the app and the carrier have to support RCS which is why Google made their own backend.
