Whatsapp has virtually no market share in the US. In basically all markets outside of the US, however, they are dominating the messaging space. Text messages in major EU countries like Germany and France have been almost completely supplanted by WhatsApp.

> In basically all markets outside of the US, however, they are dominating the messaging space

...WhatsApp certainly isn't dominating in the Asian markets, you only have to look at WeChat.

WhatsApp is huge in Malaysia, where I'm from. WeChat, Line, and those other messaging apps are tiny in comparison.

From what I can tell, though, it's literally the two of those that are controlling the space outside the U.S.

er.. Line? KakaoTalk?

Is that because SMS costs a fortune in Europe? As an American with unlimited SMS/MMS, I don't see the point of WhatsApp at all.

I guess maybe if I wanted to send a text to somebody in Europe.

Nationwide SMS is dirt cheap in most of Europe too. But the cost goes up rapidly when you send messages across borders, say from Italy to Germany. And international MMS are just ridiculously expensive. A friend of mine once paid ~5€ for a single MMS sent from Croatia to Germany. Croatian, Slovenian and Austrian telcos all wanted their share of roaming fees.

With WhatsApp you don't need to worry about all these things.

Seems like carriers or device manufacturers could easily undercut them by offering the same service, but preinstalled. I guess Apple already does, with iMessage. If only they weren't so blindly stubborn about interoperability.

The problem with iMessage is that you don't know if your friend has an iPhone.

I agree with this. In South Africa we use Whatsapp more than anything (including BBM these days). When I rocked up in Canada, I found that very few people use Whatsapp here, since BBM is losing market share, I find that most if not all of my colleagues are just using plain ol' text, as they get unlimited texting from their providers.

Whatsapp appears to have very little market share in the sparsely populated arse end of the world (Oceania), at least so far as I can tell. Not that that's exactly a large market, but still.

Surprisingly in France you can have illimited text messaging for 2€ per month, 1 hour of communication included.

Though I'm not sure about you stats for usage.

In Spain the same as that, or even more so. That's 45MM people at a single strike.

To be fair doing startups with the goal of getting acquired by FB has been a thing for a while.