In Holland, WhatsApp dominates, and it's not a $10/day country.
It dominates because SMS rates were too expensive here. Even when Mom & Dad would buy you an iPhone, kids were choosing Blackberries (!) as their primary phone because of internet messaging.
WhatsApp was seen as something worked with non BB devices (iPhones, Androids). It pretty much murdered the cell phone providers who were giving away cheap data rates and betting on income from increased SMS usages. Whoops.
When iMessage and Hangouts came along it was really too late. The process flow for most users who want to send a text is: go to WhatsApp first, if the user isn't there or doesn't respond, send an SMS and be frustrated with them.
Anyone could have beat WhatsApp in NL, but didn't. If the telcos would have given out unlimited SMS messages, it probably wouldn't exist. If BlackBerry would have released iOS/Andriod versions, they probably would have been the standard in Holland. If Apple would have released iMessage earlier, instead of (presumably) not wanting to piss off the carriers, it would have stood a chance. ... certainly if they also released apps for other platforms.
Yes and I would also add that using the phone number / imei as account identifier helped them a lot to convince everybody and their mother to use the service. Personally I'm not a friend of WhatsApp, but the reason even older, far from tech-savvy people are using it is the ease of access - you don't need anyones username or email - just install the app and your existing contacts show up. I've seen people who couldn't remember their own email using the app within seconds on a feature phone. Try that with Facebook.
I'm from Portugal and I saw in the comments that many people use it here. In my experience I never used it. I know maybe two people that use it. But clearly my view must be totally off the reality because of the stuff I read here and in the article comments section.
I pay 5€ a month and have unlimited free SMS's for almost everybody in my network. And that's it. That's what I use.
I could see the problem of cross device messaging, but SMS are for that.
To use Whatapp I'd need internet and pay for that in my mobile plan. I don't want that.
Although I have free unlimited sms for people I contact to (and use it a lot) there's still a little problem, that normally it is only for people in the same mobile network as me. But not really a huge problem because those people are very few and I don't mind spending the money in my phone that I wouldn't use for anything else.
Oh the sms and calls for people in my network are all free, so I have always money not being used for anything in the phone card.
I'm from Spain, and curiously, what you say about Holland applies to Spain word by word (well, maybe with the exception of iMessage having a chance - iPhones never got to be very popular here).
It would be interesting if some made a study about price of SMSs in each European countries 4 or 5 years ago vs. WhatsApp adoption. Maybe the huge differences in market shares would be clarified.
It dominates because SMS rates were too expensive here. Even when Mom & Dad would buy you an iPhone, kids were choosing Blackberries (!) as their primary phone because of internet messaging.
WhatsApp was seen as something worked with non BB devices (iPhones, Androids). It pretty much murdered the cell phone providers who were giving away cheap data rates and betting on income from increased SMS usages. Whoops.
When iMessage and Hangouts came along it was really too late. The process flow for most users who want to send a text is: go to WhatsApp first, if the user isn't there or doesn't respond, send an SMS and be frustrated with them.
Anyone could have beat WhatsApp in NL, but didn't. If the telcos would have given out unlimited SMS messages, it probably wouldn't exist. If BlackBerry would have released iOS/Andriod versions, they probably would have been the standard in Holland. If Apple would have released iMessage earlier, instead of (presumably) not wanting to piss off the carriers, it would have stood a chance. ... certainly if they also released apps for other platforms.