Basically everything I was doing came to a grinding halt for 45 minutes because I live in Latin America, where your entire life runs on WhatsApp.
It's infuriating because nobody will consider any other messaging app. My phone's carrier also gives everyone several free GBs of WhatsApp data per month.
WhatsApp rose to prominence because data was cheaper than SMS. Is that still the case in Latin America? In Australia there are no mobile plans with metered SMS charges anymore.
Yes, at least for me it is. My pre-paid plan (~$14/mo) gets me 4GB data but only 50 SMS. I also get 3GB of free WhatsApp data. There is no prepaid plan with unlimited SMS.
Technically, I do as well, but it's baked into my cell phone bill. I think I get something like 10,000 SMS messages/mo without incurring an extra charge, and the extra charge if I go over is small.
you can still buy lots of sms for cheap, and free sms plans(i think i have) but they aren't included because nobody uses them, i not read sms who isn't from 2fa in more than 7 years, it is publicity, scams, and miss calls.
"i not read sms who isn't from 2fa in more than 7 years, it is publicity, scams, and miss calls."
Funnily enough the volume of scam calls and txt that I receive via WhatsApp is why I have it disabled.
The only reason I ever use it is because we sometimes need cross platform group messaging to organise plans with other families or school groups, then I delete the app again
The provider gives you 4 billion bytes over 4G/5G plus 50 * 140 bytes = 7000 bytes over SMS.
Quite shocking, yes. SMS used to be free in the early 90s until the providers figured out that they can charge for it. They priced the 140 byte transmission at 0.20 CHF in Switzerland, and in some plans you still pay 0.20 CHF for 140 bytes over SMS, while you can get unlimited data.
Dont know about OP, but in my place, India, Whatsapp is lifeline of society. Wedding invites, sales pamphlets, news, wishes, purchases, money transfer, book sales, car rentals, friends to friends money transfer, progress reports, school communication to parents, 100s of types of clubs, almost everything gets sorted on Whatsapp. The activity which gets limited by Whatsapp (like members in group, need bot etc) moves to Telegram.
Whatsapp rose because carriers didn't count any whatsapp payload towards your metered bill. Basically, Whatsapp was virtually free-of-charge whereas any other messaging app/system (SMS included) incurs towards your data cap.
At least that's what happened (And still happens) in Mexico.
In Chile more or less all data plans give you free Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger don't count towards data usage) and Prepaid any balance charged over ~1$ Gives you from 3 to 30 days of the same
I worked on carrier partnerships (among many other things) while I was at WhatsApp, from before FB through 2019. Carriers wanted to setup special pricing (including zero-rating) for WhatsApp with or without our help or approval. Before acquisition, the only compensation we provided was approval to use our brand (which we didn't have resources to litigate around the world over anyway), our list of IPs (and notifications when they changed), and maybe a little bit of guidance/support on how to identify traffic; although from conversations I had, the DPI vendors had ways of doing it anyway without our help. In return, WA got some amount of marketing, and sometimes access to zero cost SMS (used for registration). Additionally, by participating with carriers, rather than letting them do their own thing, we were able to influence them towards providing a good experience for users; WA did not approve of text only special pricing[1], it had to include attachments, and we did our best to keep carriers updated on IPs to reduce the amount of miscategorized usage leading to overage or connectivity problems. To my knowledge, there was only one deal with monetary compensation, but it theoretically flowed to WA, not to the carrier.
My understanding is the carriers wanted to run these deals because they attract customers who often convert to full internet plans. Messaging is nice, but customers eventually get outside links and want to experience the web or other applications.
Post acquisition, deals moved into Facebook's mobile partner portal, and afaik, there was still no compensation for WhatsApp deals, but the MPP does also offer analytics (audience insights) to carriers, and I'm not sure if it's a requirement to have a special pricing deal to get that or not.
It's been several years, so it's possible the program has changed.
[1] If you've seen that on planes, it wasn't authorized when I was there, and I don't think it's authorized now, but it doesn't stop a motivated network from providing the service.
You can totally have an on-premise appliance that behaves like a black box, is remotely managed by the vendor and depends on their cloud services for even basic functionality. (Not saying that this is what WhatsApp's solution is – I've never looked into it!)
I think it's effectively some weird containerized WhatsApp client. The benefit seems to be that it provides end-to-end encryption between the company and the customer, unlike Meta's hosted version.
It is, but for B2C messaging, there is a solution hosted by Meta that terminates the encryption at the gateway level (i.e. Meta can see the message content).
The alternative to that is the on-premise solution.
Interesting, looking at the history it appears to be a spotty last few months. "Major" outages every two weeks or so. I wonder what brings instability into such a mature product.
Pre-acquisition WhatsApp was built using Erlang and had an impressively large user-to-server ratio IIRC. I expect that since then things have mostly been rebuilt to use existing meta shared infrastructure which might not be as stable or efficient.
downdetector.com is also showing a spike of users reporting issues with Instagram around the same time. Assuming both products are hosted with the same infra, perhaps the issue is up-the-chain and not related to any changes in the product per se.
I haven't used WhatsApp in ages, and a couple hours ago I got a very persistent scammer trying to get me to talk to them. Probably just a coincidence, but it makes me wonder if this is security related.
No, not literally everyone, I'm in Europe, I don't use it, my family doesn't use it, my friends don't use it, nearly nobody in my city uses it, in fact most people in my entire country don't use it.
Sure, WhatsApp could roll out an update that sneakily exfiltrates your local encryption keys and/or messages any day, or might have already done so. That's the case for most apps (yes, even open source ones, since at least the Apple App Store does not allow for deterministic builds.)
It's theoretically possible to improve on that, by e.g. providing a way to double-check all client-to-server communication, but that's extremely difficult to do without at the same time weakening the encryption (since it requires either deterministic encryption and/or leaking keys via a debugging interface). I believe Threema has done something like that at some point.
Telegram however wouldn't even need to, since practically all messages are already available to them server side.
> Maybe the 'other' people you know also just use it the same way you do
I'm confused about what you're responding to here. What other people? I didn't mention anyone else. That one friend happens to be the only person I know who uses it. Or at least the only person I know who has asked me to use it.
I didn't assert that nobody else uses it. In fact, I was providing an example that not everyone has abandoned it.
It's infuriating because nobody will consider any other messaging app. My phone's carrier also gives everyone several free GBs of WhatsApp data per month.