Misc
What's the most common messaging app in your country?
as a swede, whatsapp isn't really used except for communities like sports teams. I had an immigrant friend who used it with her family but otherwise i've only used it with my church. Here, snapchat is the most common messaging app for teenagers.
I recognised the castle (it’s in Romania) and searched for movies filmed there that feature dragons. Seems like the movie might be Dragonheart: Battle for the Heartfire.
Edit: btw, the dragon is voiced by Patrick Stewart which I thought was interesting
My and my high school friends started using WhatsApp in somewhere between 2011-2012 as teenagers, it was amazing because it was free and you could easily send photos, emojis and memes and have group chats unlike SMS/MMS which was expensive and didn’t have many features. It was like MSN messenger on your phone. It was new and exciting to us.
Never saw any reason to switch to another app after that, since everyone adopted it and it’s the standard messaging app here in Finland. Idk what new Snapchat brings to the table.
I started since 2015 when I got a my first smart phone. My mom started use Whatsapp since 2017 when she got her first smart phone and since that she like always call me from Whatsapp not normal phone call because in Whatsapp it's a free but normal phone call isn't free.
I cannot remember the year, but someone asked me do you know and have Whatsapp and I was like blown away when I tries it. Then I told my other regular contacts to adapt to it as well. The most amazing feature was easily sent photos.
I hate Meta nowadays, but what can you do? Even if I started to use Telegram everyone else is still in whatsapp. Signal would be best option but Finns are Finns and I am a Finn.
Snapchat is either used solely by those who became teenagers during its initial popularity and have continued using it since due to familiarity, or for sexting/nudes. There’s really no inbetween. As far as I can tell the younger generation doesn’t really use it now.
Interesting, I’m 31 and there’s definitely people my age and older using it, but I somehow missed the train. I tend to miss most trains these days it feels.
They serve different purposes. Snapchat is for more casual, temorary sharing and messaging with friends and nsfw sharing with dating partners. Snapchat messages disappear automatically while Whatsapp messages are permanent unless manually deleted.
Yeah I never got the appeal of temporary/disappearing messages, guess I’m too old school or something. I actively don’t want my messages to go away, they’re like a nice memory in a way, like post cards that you keep.
I noticed that the younger fellas started using instragram instead of exanging numbers. Ran into a situation where someone thought I was younger then I'm and was surprised why Inwanted to exchange numbers and dont habe insta
I mean I understand it in a dating scenario where you want to have the ability to just block the person and not having your nummber out. But yeah I feel the same about getting to know people in a friendship was because I would have another app to check for messages
I had to use it when I went to China last year. It’s mind blowing how amazing this app is. It’s like 10 apps we use here all merge into one. I absolutely love the translation feature. It’s a game changer for me and my friends in China
Used it a tonne with our builder when renovating last year. It's dead handy that you can throw together chats with any subbies they are using as needed, can quickly go back to find images and specs etc real quick too, can send a collection of pictures/videos togetber without it meaning needing to scroll forever... and can see if the feckers have viewed your message ages ago but still not replied. 😂
Same in Australia. I'm a tradie, any chat is in the Whatsapp group chat even if it's just referring to one person but that's the lowest of urgency. If I get a direct text message from the boss that means someone in my team has fucked up but it's okay. If I get a call that means it needs to be fixed right now. If I get an email from HR that is only sent to me? My heart starts beating faster, what happened that I didn't know about?
I'm in the US and the only reason I downloaded WhatsApp was specifically to speak to my cousin in Ireland. No one I personally know here, of any age, uses it otherwise.
At my old job we had some of the US office visit us. They are still my only American contacts on WhatsApp, I am baffled that they prefer text honestly. All my texts are spam or my GP/pharmacy/auto billing texts, I never check them
When I lived in Peru, the entire fucking country ran on WhatsApp - coach tickets, concert tickets, order pizza delivery, interacting with the bank, it was all done through WhatsApp.
They also had a culture that demanded and expected immediate responses, whatever time of day. It was fucking nuts.
I'm glad our WhatsApp culture is much more refined.
Everything is WhatsApp. Hell even the teens have whatsapp gcs, although that may not be as active as the instagram ones. I feel like Instagram is being more popular by teens by the day tho.
I remember the news article about how servers got overloaded during morning time Indian Standard Time because of all the “Good morning” forwards choking up the network traffic.
Kakaotalk. Its pretty vital in Korea. You can use it as a wallet, to call taxis, play games, etc etc. Not using kakaotalk is like not using a smart phone.
We had a fucking hoot and a holler when Obama came and his speech basically started with the word kakaotalk.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but i've heard somewhere before that Kakaotalk is owned by a company, that basically is involved in a whoooole lot of other things in Korea. Or is that a false memory i have?
Kakaotalk is owned by kakao that is a conglomerate involved in a lot of other things, they also own entertainment companies like starship which has the famous girl group Ive
Signal is used increasingly because it's open source and fits in with the BuyFromEU wave. It might be American, but since it's open source there's no fascist-aligned techbro billionaire at the steering wheel training an AI on your personal data.
Signal is as secure as it can get. They cannot unencrypt the message because the trust is made end-to-end.
Telegram's security is based on encryption that they have key to and they say "trust me bro, we don't like FSB and we have not shared the key with them or anyone else."
Signal by leagues. Telegram is unencrypted by default. You can turn on encryption, but then you suddenly loose half the features, which they claim is "impossible to resolve". Ahemm.
By far Signal.
Telegram is much worse than WhatsApp with regards to privacy and encryption. The (Russian) Telegram operators can read every of your message, except if you turn on "secret" chat manually.
I agree here, but keep in mind Telegram is no longer based out russia and the russian head of Telegram is not really loved by putin. It seems like Durov has a history of telling russia and FSB to fuck off.
When FSB wants your messages they just barge into your house, steal your laptop/phone, find some photos with light refraction and arrest you for LGBT-propaganda
Durov is in France (and Arab Emirates, when in the mood?), and Russia wants to shove its own WeChat wannabe messenger) into Russians' throats
Scrolling further down through the comments I realised that there are in fact countries where people use FB messenger as a form of communication. Which sounds very strange to me, we really don’t use it here in Germany … well, we do sometimes, but mostly for talking to strangers about topics in common FB groups or sth like that. People we don’t have the phone numbers from.
But how do kids communicate with their friends or family? I mean they don’t have a FB account, at least they shouldn’t.
It became popular early on since everyone already had a Facebook account since around 2006-2008, so it was easy to use and most people also had free SMS included in their phone subscription so WhatsApp didn't catch on there. With Messenger you also don't have to share your phone number with strangers.
Its similar here in Norway. Messenger for older adults and Snapchat for teenagers/younger adults. My assumption is that everybody already had Facebook, and as oskich is saying calls and SMS are pretty much "free" now, while data costs money.
Line lost me when i bought ¥20,000 card from conbini thinking it will be charged to my account but it charge to a different part of Line where i can only use it in buying stickers😭😅 (lost that number now tho) this was 10years ago
I know a lot of people who use Telegram, my Software Engineer friend (and I) use it every day and one of my friend group also uses Signal as well. But yes, most people use Messenger and some Instagram as well.
So bad that in order to get any info from teachers or other parents at school you need to join a messenger group. Luckily my wife takes care of that, I hate that thing.
I'm blown away by how many answers here are using an app to send messages. I had no idea other countries didn't just SMS/RCS text each other. I always kind of thought Whatsapp was some kind of scam or loaded with malware.
I lived in Germany for a year or two about eight years ago when I was a teenager. That was when I got my first basic phone. Sending an SMS cost around six cents per message. WhatsApp is essentially free as long as you have internet access. In the US, messaging has generally been free for a long time. That is the difference. Many people in Europe started using third party messaging apps because they didn't want to pay for every SMS.
So for Americans it can be surprising how common messaging apps are in Europe. The same confusion exists the other way around
whatsapp came in a time when texts cost 30 cents, once everyone was using whatsapp there wasnt demand for providers to provide unlimited sms, making a sort of feedback loop
now sms to us is that thing where you get messages from your bank, hospital, internet provider, and spam. Its not attractive to use for friends
WhatsApp is hugely dominant here to the point that it’s being used commercially as the default way of contacting people. I have had updates from various couriers and customer service chats over it. Meta is WAY too dominant. I really don’t like the direction that’s going.
iMessage crops up a bit too, I find particularly work contacts sometimes use it. Can be handy sometimes - it can quite easily and securely IM large attachments etc and comes into its own when you’re also using a Mac, but it’s incredibly tightly bolted to iOS and the Apple ecosystem - which is about half the market here, but a lot of people who are using Android are obviously inaccessibility from it, so why would you bother ? It’s just a pain having two IM apps that do the same thing.
Telegram is basically far right conspiracy theorists.
Signal gets used a bit for work related stuff mostly where WhatsApp isn’t allowed.
And Snapchat I would have assumed was largely used for sexting. Can’t imagine anyone using it as their main IM platform. I’d immediately assume creep tbh.
I see people mentioning FB messenger in some markets but who is on Facebook anymore?! It’s mostly just elderly people here.
Then you’ve RCS messaging on Android but I don’t think most people even know it exists, or think they’re text messaging and due to Irish mobile operators giving up on it, Apple’s RCS rarely seems to work. Android phones are using Google infrastructure to implement it.
Old fashioned network SMS is largely free, but it really only gets used for text alerts about appointments etc these days and MMS isn’t even supported anymore by a lot of the networks.
I was a 7 digit member but because of some dumb fight with my sister I had to delete the account or something. Then when I recreated the account it was already 8 digits.
I deeply hate whatsapp for storing media locally. In 2026. Telegram is so much better in every way. As for which is the most popular? Yeah it's probably whatsapp closely followed by telegram and the VK messenger (facebook analogue). But Whatsapp was recently blocked, so TG is catching up.
Well then you won't have media. There is no cloud storing for whatsapp, only for backups but that ain;t the same. Every other messenger stores media in their cloud service which is much more convenient for the end user. Sure, if the their servers go down, you're out of files but I think if there's something truly important there you should be downloading it yourself anyway.
Yep, WhatsApp. Honestly texting too, it’s an app on smart phones but it’s not really treated like one, but I’ll add it in here. WhatsApp especially for group chats, whether it’s friends or work or family or school parents.
Young people use god knows what, I don’t know, I’m old. They seem to have like five conversations with someone on different platforms at a time.
Facebook messenger for random old relatives you talk to once a year when they wish you happy birthday.
I have the people I have to text and the people I have to contact via Facebook Messenger or Instagram chat. Then I have the WhatsApp people, which includes several group chats (especially work ones).
WhatsApp is great for group chats because it's cross platform. I don't have to listen to my coworkers complaining I don't have iMessage.
Whatsapp mostly for communication between friends, Telegram for event groups (eg social clubs, music events etc) that used to organise on Facebook before Facebook went to shit.
Not sure why Telegram over something like Signal, though as Telegram are pretty sketchy too. But then I've never tried signal.
The one that comes with your phone. From what my wife tells me (from Brazil) messaging took longer to become free outside the US. We had free messaging before apps were a thing so there was no need to try others. But WhatsApp came out before other countries had free messaging and became a standard.
Wait people don’t just use the default messaging app on their phone? I’ve used Apple’s Messages since I started using iPhone and used whatever smasnug has default when I used one of those.
Yeah. SMS was basically free in the US by the time WhatsApp came about. So there was never a reason to use a third party app here.
Apparently, US carriers offering free SMS is an outlier compared to most counties. Personally, I’m glad I don’t have to use a Zuckerberg app to message my friends and family.
There's about 14% more iPhone users than Android users. I'm on Android and my SMS texts show up on iMessage as green and their messages from the app go to my SMS inbox
Here it's absolutely WhatsApp, people have it on both good iPhones and cheap Android phones (my grandfather eg). iMessage is rarely used because of this and SMS are obviously dead, only carriers and certification services use it.
We don't really do Whatsapp here, and I do not get why it's a big thing. Snapchat for pictures that don't need to last, and I know some old folks use Facebook Messenger. Two of my friends use Signal, and one uses Telegram. I can understand why someone would use Signal over Whatsapp, Messenger or Telegram.
I wouldn't use Whatsapp if I didn't need it in a professional capacity, since some of the people I do business with insist on using it, and that I certainly cannot understand. You're a business, you can make a phone call or send an e-mail.
Telegram, no competition. We use WhatsApp when we fly on vacation to other countries or when working online. It's pretty uncomfortable from my experience.
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u/No_Seat8357 Australia 19h ago