WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

I guess this was expected, but it makes me feel really powerless in the sense that I can't really move away from WhatsApp.

I have a couple of friends that I message via Signal and even convinced my dad to use it a while back, but here in Brazil WhatsApp is _everything_, and I doubt most people care about this at all. In my case, I'd love to just go over to Signal fully but then I couldn't talk to family, friends, and probably couldn't even book a haircut or pay my taxes (my accountant messages me on WhatsApp).

It's one of those where unless just about everyone were to go over to Signal, most people won't, because keeping track of messages in two apps is quite hard.

That leaves me stuck in this ecosystem, which is quite sad.

Yup. Non-traveling US Americans mostly won’t understand how critical WhatsApp is in many parts of the world, for more than a decade. It’s much much stronger than the iMessage norm in the US.

Businesses put WhatsApp numbers on their stores, and it’s often the only way to get a hold of a person. I would bet it’s more used than email, especially for young people. If WhatsApp went down for a week, it would seriously impede normal societal functions. It’s pretty much de-facto standard and arguably critical infrastructure.

What about non traveling Chinese?

I'd say Chinese people are aware that their Internet is pretty different from the rest of the world.

Americans tend to believe everyone is trying very hard to be like them (when they think about the rest of the world at all).

Ironically WhatsApp is also American.