“To my parents, WhatsApp isn’t just an instant messenger,” said Devang Pathak, a 25-year-old writer from Mumbai. “It’s an entire social network."
“Honestly, Facebook is a little complex for me,” said my mother. “And it’s not a place where I can reach everyone I care about at once as I can do in a WhatsApp group.
“My primary reason to forward things was to alert people I care about or warn them about something, and unfortunately, a lot of those things ended up being hoaxes.”
You are your phone number. Your regular contacts are your WhatsApp contacts.
WhatsApp’s popularity is heavily region-dependent. My guess is that WhatsApp’s popularity in Europe, South America, certain parts of Africa, and India initially had something to do with the cost of cell service a few years back.
Whereas in North America (US and Canada in particular), Facebook Messenger and Snapchat have become the predominant mode of communication.