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, 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.
Reality@feddit.org 4 weeks ago