I am from Brazil, before WhatsApp existed, some cellphone companies were charging what was at the time 1 USD per SMS message sometimes.

When WhatsApp first shown (not owned by Facebook yet), some cellphone companies literally sued them (and lost), claiming all sorts of random bullshit.

Now everyone here uses WhatsApp, some services are WhatsApp only, as in... the service is basically a bot on WhatsApp and you send commands to that bot using WhatsApp.

I tried to not use WhatsApp, but when I saw the SMS fees... well, WhatsApp did forced them to bring fees down, but not by much.

I also tried to convince people to use other software, it worked partially...

1. Telegram, people here use this whenever WhatsApp is down, then they delete it again.

2. Kik, I was using it to talk to some poeple in other countries, for various reasons slowly this failed, the most bizarre one was a friend that lived in Alabama in US, seemly her phone company (AT&T I think?) detected her Kik usage and charged every single video chat we had as if it was an international phone call... as you can imagine this killed our Kik usage quite fast, we now use only Discord and e-mail.

3. Discord, only young people use that.

4. Slack, only works for work.

5. Matrix, Irc, etc... nobody I know in person uses it, people just refuse to use "techie" stuff.

6. ICQ, MSN, AIM, etc...: these were wildly popular here, ICQ was kinda killed by MSN, that then was killed by MS themselves for some reason. Nothing replaced MSN here.

Not only that but in a lot of countries network providers actually give away free data for certain preferred apps like Whatsapp so the financial incentive for people to keep using it is even stronger.

Never knew that kik had video call feature, but I dropped to use it not long after it appeared.

There was Duo for Android to make video calls. Might be still around, but it is only for calls and not chat, so not really useable if you have to find other ways to send chat.

Skype was one of them that I still use, but it is probably ancient technology for younger people. Skype was offered to use for free of data charge by telecom company, so you could make video calls everywhere.

The problem with Whatsapp is that it comes together with Facebook and whatsapp is terrible for privacy - you have no control over how your number and other available information will be shared with other apps, who will collect that information and someone will publish that information available as database.

I hate to break it to you, but your friend who claimed her phone company started charging her for international phone calls when you chatted using Kik probably just didn't want to talk to you anymore. AT&T and other providers don't do that.

There was no lie, the person at first was confused where charges came from, and sent me a copy of the phone bill, by reading the bill carefully I noticed they were charging for IM calls.

Internet Service Providers in the US are prohibited from charging different rates for different types of traffic. It wouldn't be legal.

It's not that easy. For example if your education establishment or employer uses it (google suite is a common one). You stop using WhatsApp, and undoubtedly lose contact with at least a few people unable or unwilling to switch to an obscure-to-them alternative of your choice. You order food from a restaurant which hosts its website on azure or aws? Supports them indirectly. Just living in a modern technological society has net negative ethical impact because you don't have control of the supply chain.

The world is complicated. Solution must be systemic. You cannot rely on everyone doing the right thing.

I don't think it's fair to place the blame on consumers when WA/IG were bought as competition killing moves (and it's hard for the average person to see that they are the same)