WhatsApp's success here in Brazil can be attributed to very few reasons:
1) Worked in every single smartphone (I started using it on a very resource constrained 2010's Nokia running s60)
2) SMS was and still is very expensive here.
3) Zero friction to use: it uses your phone number as your ID and your catalog list as its own.
It was a killer combination, almost everybody here in Brazil uses it, no matter how young or how old, no matter if it is a rich kid with the latest IPhone or the poor with the cheapest phone. Even the telcos had to bend to WhatsApp strength by offering "unlimited WhatsApp usage" on very limited data plans.
It was a killer combination, almost everybody here in Brazil uses it, no matter how young or how old, no matter if it is a rich kid with the latest IPhone or the poor with the cheapest phone. Even the telcos had to bend to WhatsApp strength by offering "unlimited WhatsApp usage" on very limited data plans.