I read about WhatsApp and how people can't part with Meta because of it, however no one on my continent uses it. Why is it so popular in the EU and other parts of the world?
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Remember paid text messaging? That lasted longer in other parts of the world than it did in the US and WhatsApp circumvented that. Also, WhatsApp allowed audio calls to long distance numbers over wifi or data, not the pricy long distance call charge.
From what I can tell, that's largely it.
With my first prepaid phone in Germany texts did cost 0.49 € per text. So I did not use them super often. Years later around 2011 that price had decreased to 0.15€ and I was texting friends a lot during uni. Around the same time me and my friends got our first smartphones with contracts for 30-40€ per month that included a small bit of data (below 1Gb). Texts still did cost 0.15€, but the data for a WhatsApp message was in the low kilobytes. So a lot of people switched to WhatsApp