WhatsApp is at home all over the world – just not where the app comes from

WhatsApp is the most popular messenger in the world – but the Messenger is not that popular in his home country. (Image source: Nuthawut, Adobe Stock)

WhatsApp is everywhere: Some grandma provides the complete relationship with status updates, some father has to download the messenger because the crawling group is only organized via WhatsApp.

The most popular messenger in the world is also popular all over the world.

Far! And even one that is considered to be out of date.

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The most popular messenger in the world is hardly on every third US cell phone

According to Statista, almost 85 percent of German WhatsApp used in 2023. For the USA, on the other hand, Mark Zuckerberg proudly announced, according to The Versge, proudly reaches 100 million monthly users, which corresponds to around every third US Internet user (according to DataTareportal)

The reasons for the lack of popularity in the USA are partially understandable, but also surprising. The Medium website has four popular reasons:

• Dominance of other messengers: According to Statista, over half of people use an iPhone. In this respect, it is not a problem for many users to simply use Apple’s in -house messenger iMessage. Also extremely popular in the USA: Facebook Messenger.
• Fewer trips abroad: Americans do not travel as much to other countries as Europeans, just because of the sheer size of the country. In this respect, Americans do not have as many contacts abroad that require communication across national borders.
• An SMS culture: Unlike in other countries, SMS flat rates have always been common. The costs per SMS, which for many Germans have made a free short message service for many Germans, were never an incentive in the United States.
• Skepticism over Meta: Despite the popularity of the Facebook messenger and the end-to-end encryption of WhatsApp chats, Americans are skeptical about Mark Zuckerberg’s group. If people look for an alternative messenger there, they landed more at Signal than with WhatsApp.

WhatsApp usage is a matter of habit

The distrust of meta is also great: especially when the group brought its chatbot meta ai on WhatsApp without much announcement, most of them wanted to know with us how to get it away again.

But to change from WhatsApp permanently, we are difficult for us: grandparents are kept up to date with the greater grandchildren over the messenger, entire school classes and sports clubs are organized in WhatsApp groups.

However, looking at the United States shows that this cannot only be due to more user -friendly features of the app. As with all social media, the platform is particularly strong here, where most of them are.

This information uses you here in Germany, unless you want to move your center of life to the USA spontaneously, so not much. However, there may be a small argument on the way to one or the other WhatsApp dropouts in SPE: in America they do it too.

What do you think? Did you know that WhatsApp is not so popular in the USA of all people? And would you also like to leave the Meta Messenger behind, but don’t see you currently? Write us your opinion and experience in the comments!