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WhatsApp with America?
WhatsApp have more than a billion worldwide users, but most of them aren’t in America. Why is that?
With the social media explosion, everyone’s become a communication machine, even if it happens to be with auto-responding bots on Twitter. But not everyone wants to post everything to everyone, sometimes you’ve got to keep it discrete.
WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app in the world, used by an estimated 55.6 percent of the world’s countries. Over 70 million users in India alone. Brazil, Mexico, Russia and Africa are also massive WhatsApp adopters. (No, Africa isn’t a country.) So why isn’t the US jumping onto a winning instant messaging app?
It provides a lot more than just traditional text messaging, such as seamless photo and video sharing, voice recordings, internet calls and more. WhatsApp messages get sent via the Internet, so they’re basically free over Wi-Fi and doesn’t deplete your data limit. Whereas text messages get sent over the telephone network, who aren’t afraid to charge.
So why the disconnect?
The biggest reason seems to be a great diversity of competitive mobile operating platforms, offering bundled flat-rate packages on SMS and MMS at a much lower cost than countries outside of the US. In the US, MMS messages are still part of the unlimited text messages included with your plan. WhatsApp’s cost effectiveness perhaps doesn’t provide enough reason for Americans to switch.
In other countries with less resources and higher data costs, the population have to get creative to save money. The rest of the world seem to have been drawn to WhatsApp as a cost efficient and user-friendly workaround. This also includes other options such as Skype, Telegram, Viber, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, iMessage and Kik.
The day Whatsapp started offering phone calls was a major milestone in communication for many. Before this it was overly expensive to call internationally. You sometimes had to wait until you flew home to find out whether your newborn was a boy or girl. Now we have almost free group calls linking all corners of the planet.
And why not, we should all be able to communicate freely. Or at least at an affordable cost. (Let’s not get started on local data pricing.)
