It's definitely not the world's messaging market. For instance in Japan and many places in SEA, Line is the standard messenger - one many people probably haven't even heard of. Though it does have a nice play on words - are you on Line?

It’s not uncommon. Orkut back in the day was wildly popular in Latin America and India. WhatsApp is the same. I think users in NA have a lot of high quality options as against those in Asia and LatAm who don’t have much reliable options other than ones developed in NA.

Instagram and iMessage are also US owned services.

Well, FB didnt build up the initial user base, just purchased it and grew it from there.

No. Here in Germany WhatsApp is not even that widespread for businesses. But WA is very big here for personal communication, though Signal comes in second (at least amongst older people, and amongst my circle)

I think Europe is not homogenous enough for this, but in the Netherlands at least, there are plenty of companies that you can't call, email or text, but they'll have some other options: a chatbot, a web form, maybe a Twitter account, and sometimes via WhatsApp indeed.

Not quite, but not too far off.

If you give someone your number, they’ll text you on WhatsApp.

According to official statistics it is the most used app since 1 september 2025 /s

I think in italy telegram is 2nd to whatsapp

> Blue bubble isn't really a thing ever mentioned in France either, not enough iPhone market share.

Nobody uses iMessage. People with iPhone use WhatsApp too.

The user experience of iMessage used to be subpar and now everyone has WhatsApp installed anyway, the feature set is the same and it works on all phone brands so nobody feels like switching.

I guess that it’s the iPhone’s messenger app? I heard that in that app, fellow iOS users have blue bubble messages and Android / other users have green bubble messages, and all the teens in the US /maybe Canada think it’s lame if you don’t have blue bubbles.

> If I were Evil-Tim-Cook, I'd have a deal with the FBI (and other agencies) where I'd hand over some user's data, in return for them keeping that secret and occasionally very publicly taking Apple to court demanding they expose a specific user and intentionally losing - to bolster Apple's privacy reputation.

The FBI wants its investigations to go to court and lead to convictions. Any evidence gained in this way would be exposed as coming form Apple; notwithstanding parallel construction:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

As for other agencies, I'm sure many have exploits to attack these devices and get spyware on them, and so may not need Apple's assistance.

It's possible for it to be a facade, but also real.

Apple is a part of PRISM so there's approximately a 100% chance that anything you send to Apple via message, cloud, or whatever else, gets sent onto the NSA and consequently any agency that wants it. But the entire mass data collection they are doing is probably unconstitutional and thus illegal. But anytime it gets challenged in courts it gets thrown out on a lack of standing - nobody can prove it was used against them, so they don't have the legal standing to sue.

And the reason this is, is because its usage is never acknowledged in court. Instead there is parallel construction. [1] For instance imagine the NSA finds out somebody is e.g. muling some drugs. They tip off the police and then the police find the car in question and create some reason to pull it over - perhaps it was 'driving recklessly.' They coincidentally find the cache of drugs after doing a search of the car because the driver was 'behaving erratically', and then this 'coincidence' is how the evidence is introduced into court.

----

So getting back to Apple they probably want to have their cake and eat it too. By giving the NSA et al all they want behind the scenes they maintain those positive relations (and compensatory $$$ from the government), but then by genuinely fighting its normalization (which would allow it to be directly introduced) in court, they implicitly lie to their users that they're keeping their data protected. So it's this sort of strange thing where it's a facade, but simultaneously also real.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

Maybe. I think they'd have a hard time keeping that under wraps—governments aren't typically very careful (and the FBI is about as careful as a bull in a china shop) about not showing their hand when it comes to charging people. If you're strict about keeping certain info on certain channels, smart observers would notice if someone were snooping.

For instance, if someone shared something incriminating in a group chat and got arrested, and that info was only shared in the group chat, they'd have to silence everyone in that group chat to ensure that the channel still seemed secure. I don't think at least our government is that competent or careful.

But also, people wayyyy overhype how much apple tries to come off as privacy-forward. They sell ads and don't even allow you to deny apps access to the internet, and for the most part their phone security seems more focused on denying you control over your own phone rather than denying a third party access to it. I think they just don't want the hassle of complying with warrants. Stuff like pegasus would only be so easy to sell if you couldn't lean on the company to gain access, and I think it'd be difficult for hundreds of countries to conspire to obscure legal pressure. Finally Apple generally has little to gain from reading your data, unlike other tech giants with perverse incentives.

Of course this is all speculation, but I do trust imessages much more than I trust anything coming out of meta, and most of what comes out of google.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just not do that and have the same thing happen, but for real?

Aren’t those encrypted with a key that lives on your device only?