Meta pushed a WhatsApp update that replaces the soccer ball ⚽ with the FIFA corruption cup soccer ball by Adidas

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[–] 66 points 3 months ago (55 children)

Why would anyone use WhatsApp when there’s Signal?

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  • [–] 81 points 3 months ago (18 children)

    Because most of the world is already on WhatsApp, and changing to Signal would isolate you from most people and businesses.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (12 children)

    Must be more popular in your country, in Canada I don't know a single person on whatsapp

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  • [–] 20 points 3 months ago (8 children)

    It's very big in western Europe. Here in the Netherlands everybody is on WhatsApp pretty much since it's creation

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  • [–] 13 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    In Germany too and I remember how upsetting it was to me from the beginning. There were third party messengers that supported established (at the time) services like ICQ or live messenger but people got onto the hot new thing because it’s so much like SMS.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    I remember starting to use it because texting was pretty expensive and limited at the time. Whatsapp was free (group) texting when on WiFi and still cheaper when on cellular. If texting wasn't so expensive at the time I really don't think whatsapp would've caught on like it did. Now people are just used to it so that's probably why it's still big

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I lived the switch in second person. My sister kept running out of SMSs to text her boyfriend, and our elder sister told her about Whatsapp and how she could have basically infinite text messages

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Exactly. And, combined with the shared amount of texts/minutes (which IIRC for me was something like 100), actually calling people and wanting to text your friends you'd run out of texts very quick. WhatsApp was a godsend at the time.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I think the whole europe except some countries

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    never heard anyone use whatsapp in sweden, everyone is expected to use something that supports sms as a fallback. Usually facebook messenger or whatever the iphone thing is called.

    Far as i know the only popular truly separate platform would be something like snapchat or kik or whatever, which is used by teenagers.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah they're all on Facebook Messenger which sucks. I've managed to switch a few in my surroundings to Signal but I still need to keep Messenger for holdouts.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    Thankfully I have managed to get everyone to switch from Messenger to Signal, atleast for talking to me haha. Two other family members being privacy oriented too really helped getting the rest of the family moved over.

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    Because in my country historically the telecom companies are charging 0.30€ per SMS (text) and 2€ per MMS (text with photo).

    So WhatsApp when they launched with their "1€/lifetime" offer on the iPhone 3GS they were the right app at the right time and became the de facto replacement for any kind of messaging. It's insane how basically overnight they replaced msn messenger and Skype because it was so convenient (Microsoft never did a smartphone client for msn messenger, only unofficial ones. It was available on dumbphones but it used SMS from the plan to send/receive, nobody used it because you needed to be a millionaire to afford it)

    SMS now in my country is only for receiving OTP codes, for the rest is WhatsApp, because still in 2026 the telecoms are still charging 2€ for each MMS sent and nobody wants to risk huge bills. This includes iMessage because if a chat suddenly goes green and you didn't notice, it costs dozens of euro

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Well Signal would be pretty much the same as WhatsApp, it sends over internet not mms or sms

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 3 months ago

    The problem is that everyone assumes you have WhatsApp.

    You take clothes to the laundry? The "your order is done" notification is sent via WhatsApp

    Any kind of work stuff is also on WhatsApp

    You order food delivery? WhatsApp

    Amazon started to send delivery notifications via WhatsApp instead of email/sms

    And luckily meta is charging businesses 5 cents for messages via API or otherwise even otp codes would be via whatsapp

    At least here, being reachable only on signal means being a digital exile

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Your telecoms are ripping you off. SMS messages 'ride' on the normal connection mechanism to cell phone towers. If your phone connects to a cell phone tower, it already has the space and data to attach an sms and requires nothing else. SMS are 'free' from the infrastructure point of view.

    Maybe lobby your representatives to make charging for them illegal and you'll get proper messaging back without selling off your data.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    In Italy we don't have the concept of "lobbying representatives". It's a US thing.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    I know we're all saying network effects, but I don't know what the fuck network effects means.

    Network effects dude. Network effects.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    It's a simple concept.

    You need at least 2 people to form a conversation.

    One of them has Whatsapp, Telegram, signal, MSTeams, smoke signals and those flags that ships used to communicate.

    The other only has Whatsapp.

    They are going to communicate over Whatsapp.

    Even if the dude with 1000 communication methods meets another dude with 1000 communication methods, they are going to use WhatsApp, because they are used to using Whatsapp with everyone, so it's just easier to have everyone on WhatsApp.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    those flags that ships used to communicate.

    i think those are called semaphore and they're cool as hell. i have a set of flags around here somewhere

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Of course the random dude I replied to on Lemmy owns a set of semaphore flags. What else would I expect?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    oh, my wife and i are [mode of communication] geeks. she knows 3 different sign languages, i know a really rare one, we both speak just enough of like 17 different languages to order food and find the library and bathroom wherever we go. Also in semaphore. Partly because we sing, partly because we like people. The first time you learn a new language it changes the way you think about the world just by giving you new words and structures to place those words. It's beautiful.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (11 children)

    I don't get to choose what app my European friends use

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