[chronid]

Not bizarre at all. Many EU countries mobile users have "prepaid" SIMs. Whatsapp came at the perfect moment - mobile operators were starting to offer decently priced data plans but were also still very stingy with SMS (which was a bit of a cash cow for them, infra costs were very low) and essentially never added at the time advanced features (like MMS) to any prepaid plan ever. Many of these operators never really recovered from becoming dumb pipes.

Now the network effects have set in and it's hard to remove "naturally" WhatsApp, combined with the rise of VoIP spam callers which operators are too happy to tolerate (like they tolerated things like premium ringtones and numbers until they were forced not to)

[mullingitover]

> VoIP spam callers which operators are too happy to tolerate

The fact that this still hasn't been solved in the year 2026 makes me wish nothing but bankruptcy on the entire legacy POTS system. Burn it all to the ground.

[shiroiuma]

>Whatsapp came at the perfect moment - mobile operators were starting to offer decently priced data plans but were also still very stingy with SMS (which was a bit of a cash cow for them, infra costs were very low) and essentially never added at the time advanced features (like MMS) to any prepaid plan ever.

Right, this explains the history of why Europeans (and others) don't use SMS any more and use chat apps, namely WhatsApp. But still, that was many years ago, and there are many other (and better) chat apps out there now. The EU has been agitating a lot against US tech dominance, but they seem stuck on WhatsApp from Meta; they should have been moving to something else a long time ago.

[chronid]

I don't think the dependency from Whatsapp (it's arguable other apps are "better" or not and on which axis) is critical. WA has alternatives (up to "no app at all" thanks to RCS).

The real issue with US tech dominance is B2B (i.e. Microsoft)