Home » WhatsApp focuses on the American market, which in 2022 is still the realm of texting

WhatsApp focuses on the American market, which in 2022 is still the realm of texting

by admin

The postman knocks on the door, delivers some letters: they are all open, and he candidly admits that he has read them. The Amazon courier rings the bell, has a package, is open: he has looked at what’s inside and knows what’s inside. Both have violated the recipient’s privacy, they have minded their own business and are two of the examples chosen for the commercials created to convince Americans to use WhatsApp.

The campaign, aired for the first time in the US this weekend (also on YouTube, video below), is all about confidentiality and end-to-end encryption (things?), remembering how much superior it is to the level of security offered by sms, which is practically nil. Why the comparison with sms? Why in the United States, second a research published in 2019 by Ctia (it’s this one) 5.5 billion text messages are still sent a day. Over 5 billion text messages a day in what is perhaps the most advanced and modern country of all, where the largest and most important technological companies are based, cradle of Silicon Valley and its hundreds of startups with innovative and revolutionary ideas. People write to themselves over 5 billion times every day using a method that the rest of the world has practically abandoned.

youtube: one of the WhatsApp commercials intended for Americans

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl-PdZ_Qdt8

The US and the resistance of text messages
That’s right: incredible as it may seem, the most popular messaging app (around 2 billion users worldwide) is very little used in America. Why does this happen? Why do Americans prefer texting? It happens mainly for two reasons.

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The first is the laziness: All Android smartphones have a pre-installed Messages app that does just that, it sends messages as text messages. Using another app, such as WhatsApp, Telegram or even Signal, means having to create an account on the Play Store, search for that app, download it, install it, learn how to use it. Too complicated, compared to using the one already on the phone. And so many (very many, judging by the numbers) they decide to be satisfied with Messages. And texting. It is the same laziness that makes us leave the default settings for brightness, contrast and color when we buy a new TV; the same that prevents us from knowing the hidden functions of our new car, because we don’t want to spend time learning them; the same one that makes us use the microwave only to heat food, because that’s okay and it doesn’t matter if it could do a thousand other things.

The second reason is somehow related to this, even if it has to do with iPhones and iMessage: in the US, Apple smartphones are much, much more popular than in Italy. But very really, especially among the very young: almost 75% of people between 18 and 24 have one. Two out of 3 young people in the United States have an iPhone and to send messages they don’t use Messages but they use iMessage, because that is the app installed by default on their phone (it’s the talk of laziness, again): if the person you write to has another iPhone, the text is sent via Internet; if he has an Android, he is sent a text message. And this contributes to increasing the traffic of messages mentioned above. And also a generate a sort of “iPhone envy” that the Wall Street Journal recently also talked about (we wrote about it here), with Android users feeling discriminated against and Apple users being a bit of a snob.

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Why is WhatsApp trying now?
Here, WhatsApp tries to slip right here: convincing people to use its app, on the one hand, would increase the security and confidentiality of their conversations and on the other hand it would help to contrast the green bubble-blue bubble complex (from the colors of sms-iMessage conversations seen on iPhones).

Making it will not be easy (there is always the talk of laziness, not to be underestimated), but if there is a right time to try, this is it: the company belongs to Facebook, a brand that is even less popular in the US than in the rest of the world. And the recent name change to Meta, which is also emphasized the first time you open the app, could help confuse the waters a little and make you forget a past that not everyone wants to remember.

The company believes in it so much that it would even be ready to develop a specific app for iPads: “They’ve been asking us for it for years and we’d really like to do it,” he said Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp within Meta, at The Verge. Who knows if they will really do it, or if laziness will still win for them too.

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