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Pechente@feddit.org 9 hours agoIn 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.
bluesheep@sh.itjust.works 9 hours ago
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
plutopos@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
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
bluesheep@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
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.
plutopos@lemmy.zip 3 hours ago
This is another reason why I think the key to success is timing. Be the first to provide a service people need, and they’ll use it for a long time