Exactly. People started using and are still using Whatsapp because it allows global, free communication. When it started getting popular, greedy service providers were still charging several euro cents for a few bytes of data sent via SMS, even to the same network, of course people went for the free alternative (I actually installed Viber before WhatsApp).

Nowadays it still has the advantage of being free when communicating abroad. I travel a lot, and calls from foreign countries, sometimes on different continents, are expensive and low in quality; a local data SIM on my dual sim phone allows me to call friends and relatives at home with the same ease as a normal phone call and without crazy costs.

It used your existing phone number as your identifier

Wait, people think of that as an advantage? For me, that has always been the reason I have refused to use it. It's also why I never even tried Google's Allo despite being a big fan. A chat application that isn't using the phone network shouldn't be tied to your phone number. It makes cross-platform support extremely awkward, and that's noticeable in how poor What's App still is for cross-platform use.

I sympathize. This kept me on Facebook far longer than I wanted to be. If I wanted concert dates, event invites from friends, etc, I had to use it. I cut that cord eventually, but I get invited to way less stuff than I used to.

You can, it'll just be a struggle.

If you stand firm, you can get enough people to recognize that there are viable alternatives, and once you hit a decent number of friends and family, it takes over on its own.

The EU Digital Market Act is in place and WhatsApp was considered a gatekeeper for messaging so they will probably be forced to open up to other messaging networks, hopefully breaking the network effect

Absolutely agree. WhatsApp is the default in my country and all across Europe. For instance, I was on holiday earlier this month and the hotel I was staying in just contacted me through WhatsApp with check-in info. They hadn't replied to earlier emails but defaulted straight to WhatsApp for communication. It would be a nightmare to move away from it at this point. At least it still doesn't feel like a Meta app.

I'm in the UK, and I use Telegram. It's far superior to WhatsApp, and has somewhat better ethics (for now).

Yet I disagree with the article in many points. It didn't always belong to Facebook, and that's how it started, originally it even asked for something akin to one dollar for one year of usage (it was converted to some very small amount for each country).

One should also understand that in countries like India, Brazil, and a few others SMS and Internet on phones are extremely expensive. WhatsApp provided a very nice way to bypass SMS and stay within the lower plans for internet usage on mobiles. The big advantage here was to use your work or home internet to still reach out to people.

I know that in Brazil telcos introduced an entry line phone plan at one time saying that Whatsapp messages would be exempted from data caps.

Eventually, Facebook bought WhatsApp.

Saying it is simple to replace WhatsApp without considering the economic situation of the people relying on it is absurd.

Comparing it to FOSS alternatives at the current stage is easy enough, but every attempt at creating a FOSS alternative didn't take. It is not uncommon to see the FOSS software not prioritizing the functionality and needs of users, and that will have people flock to whatever is useful to them, despite possible hidden costs.

I say this as someone who uses Matrix for chat, yet there are some critical bugs in usability that developers just ignore (like doing something basic like sharing from IOS breaks the spec and causes errors to several others).

When things like these happen there is always someone who will come ahead and say "this is provided for free" or "learn to code and fix it yourself".

Eventually we get Pikachu faces or articles talking about the greatness of FOSS while ignoring all the main point "people still need a stable tool that fits their economic power while someone argues about how to fix a problem they don't really care about". As someone who mostly uses open source software, this is really frustrating.

Yeah, as annoying as it is, unless you're using messaging software that has been externally audited for security, you should probably assume admins/owners can read your messages.

And you can easily disable pocket.

I can't speak for the author, but I have some feelings about the matter. Baking a proprietary service into an open source browser, and of course requiring accounts. Then the FF accounts merging with the Pocket accounts. I really wasn't pleased.

I was forced to stop using WhatsApp a while back because they simply stopped supporting my phone, and I sure as hell wasn't going to buy a new one just to use WhatsApp. I came to the conclusion that anyone that doesn't bother reaching out e.g. via SMS isn't a real friend anyway, and indeed it hasn't affected me personally much. There are some people I've lost contact with completely now, but we didn't have proper conversations when I still had WhatsApp anyway, so not much was lost.