Are you in the USA?

iMessage is only really relevant in the USA. Meanwhile, Whatsapp is huge in Latin America, Europe, Africa, parts of Asia

Popularity doesn’t have any affect on how many people you need to build it.

Presumably a lot of these are content moderation staff, often much cheaper than engineers. Facebook claimed to have made good progress in the last year automating moderation, but could also just be backing off on moderation to reduce costs at increased risk of regulation.

Often that kind of staff will be employed via agencies, so it's difficult to really compare between companies as we don't have the numbers. For instance, Apple presumably need a lot of staff to moderate apple pay, but if they have outsourced the rolls we won't know how many there are or see if they get cut.

We're specifically talking WhatsApp, there's no moderation in private messaging.

Oh, so that's why we have millions of blog articles about how to scale software and software organizations?

Because software used by 10k people needs as many features and infrastructure care and investment as one used by 3 billion people?

That's not how it works, WhatsApp had 50 engineers when it had 900M users[0]. Beside iMessage is not only used by 10k, some estimates put it at more than 1 billion users[1].

[0]https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...

[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2022/09/10/why-apple...

iMessage has a lot of users if you count people with iphones who very occasionally try to send a text but end up using iMessage. I count as one but it still is completely irrelevant to me. WhatsApp is where everything interesting is.

Same here. I’m always shocked when I meet someone that doesn’t use WhatsApp

I'm always shocked when I meet someone that doesn't use WeChat

I'm always shocked when I meet someone that doesn't use Signal

I'm always shocked when I meet someone that doesn't use Facebook Messenger

I'm always shocked when I meet someone that doesn't use LINE

I'm always shocked when I meet someone that doesn't use Telegram

I'm always shocked when I meet someone that doesn't use QQ

etc.

It is true that WhatsApp seems to be the largest, but it's still used by fewer than 25% of humans, so you might be shocked often.

25% of humans is astonishing considering only about 2/3rds of humans have internet access.

I'm always surprised when I meet someone who does. None of my friends (+their family) or my family have ever used it. Nobody I hang out with will even say they have whatsapp. Maybe it's because we're "desktop people", which doesn't explain the lack of participation by someone like my wife. She uses her phone almost exclusively. shrug

US vs ROTW

there's still infrastructure in place to support you. there's a cost per user and cost per message, and you contributing to the former even if not to the latter.

> Try to send a text but end up using iMessage

iMessage is the default SMS and messaging app on iPhones. It’s what most people use for texting as well as messaging on iPhone.

In the US. Outside even iPhone users use WhatsApp or similar.

No need for egregious hyperbole, there are well more than 10k iPhones in the USA

I’d rephrase as “In the US, only iMessage is relevant”

Which is surprising considering how bad it is.

In what way is iMessage bad? It works amazingly well from my perspective.

And you're using an android phone I presume?

WhatsApp runs the exact same whether it's an iPhone or an android phone. That's not trivial.

iMessage when I have to use my MacBook because my phone is charging is amazingly awful, completely inflexible.

Have you not used another messaging app?

I am in US, from an Asian community; & people in my circle who own an iPhone still prefer Whatsapp for like 100+ msgs a day. Never saw them using iMessage even for other iPhone users.

>> Apple runs a competitor for that too with iMessage so I’d call it a wash.

I agree, and I’m sure it’s adoption rate is increasing globally.

I’m just saying… WhatsApps global impact on an everyday basis is quite overlooked.

There are countries where people solely depend on WhatsApp to communicate externally. Todays’ green sms on an iPhone is equivalent to a WhatsApp text.

If that fallback, that Facebook controls and owns, didn’t exist or your country banned it—imagine not receiving messages from your kids because “WhatsApp is down”?

Anyways tldr; WhatsApp is cheaper than sms. The default communication for many. More affordable. More used daily as a necessity.