Why are so few people using WhatsApp in the US?

Last Monday, millions of users were unable to use some of the world’s most used social networks. For more than six hours, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and every Facebook group have been down, without loading or updating, making millions of people able to continue talking to their contacts.

Specifically, this drop in Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp affected more than 2 billion people in 180 different countries. One of the countries hardest hit by the crash is likely to be believed by many that the US is one of the parent companies of all of these apps.

But this is not the case, at least with regard to the world’s most used messaging app, the fact is that WhatsApp is not a “prophet in its own land”, or at least not to the same extent in other parts of the world.

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Juan Manuel Garcia

Spain and the United States, two diametrically opposed cases

According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, in the United States, less than 20% of smartphone users use WhatsApp to communicate. Undoubtedly, an astonishing number considering that this application was born there firstly, and secondly, it is used by a large part of the population in Spain.

Focusing on the numbers, it is estimated that about 75 million people use WhatsApp in the US at first it may seem a high number, but considering that 329.5 million people live in the North American country, only 22, 77% use this messaging app.

If we look at Spain, the situation is completely different. According to the latest report by Hootsuite and We Are Social last June, coinciding with Social Networking Day, 89.5% of Spaniards with social networks use WhatsApp, ahead of the closely followed YouTube (89.3%), and Facebook (79.2%).

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Paula Ponce

Why is WhatsApp not working in the US?

The fact that there are not many users of WhatsApp in your country of birth is due to several factors. One of them is that although it may seem old to us, millions of people continue to choose to use SMS in the US, because unlike other countries, many companies in the US offer unlimited and free texting.

Likewise, a Facebook group competes with itself because, for example, in Facebook Messenger, the messaging app that you can chat with your Facebook contacts, it has more users than WhatsApp. So, that doesn’t mean that messaging apps aren’t winning in the US: they do, but that’s not the case with WhatsApp.

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Francesc Brasero

However, its low success in the US does not seem to affect WhatsApp much, because it is currently the messaging app with the largest number of users on the planet, exceeding 2 billion users, and ahead of Facebook Messenger, Snapchat or Telegram. However, it is still strange that precisely the country in which he was born is the one in which he did not finish succeeding.

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