According to data from Statista , WhatsApp currently has more than 2,000 million users worldwide, of which 31.98 million correspond to Spain. In terms of frequency of use, 84% of Spaniards say they communicate via WhatsApp several times a day, while 13% say they do so only once. With such figures we can ensure that it is the instant messaging application that we all use on a daily basis, as well as our contacts. Would it be possible to get out without causing an irreversible change in habits?
Living in an increasingly digital and interconnected world , our technological decisions no longer depend exclusively on us. If our workgroup, family, or friends use an app, you’ll be “forced” to use it if you want to keep in touch. With that said, let’s take a look at what it would be like today to try to run away from Meta’s proprietary messaging app.
Competition not strong enough
As is often the case, competition is good, since feedback ends up improving a sector to the extent that one of its actors does so and the rest replicate it. We have seen many alternatives wanting to get the main part of a type of application for which the then Facebook paid 19,000 million dollars in 2014.
It seemed that Line was going to snatch the throne and it did not happen, it seemed that recently the more than 50 million users of Signal in 2021 were a threat and nothing. Not even Telegram , the real alternative to the use of WhatsApp, has finished penetrating with force. Although Telegram grows, the majority still prefers WhatsApp and in the case of Spain that majority shoots up.
It is difficult to leave WhatsApp if all your contacts have it.
In that regard, it seems that at the moment escaping from WhatsApp is an impossible task. You could leave, but you would lose a few contacts who have not made the leap to Telegram and are not going to, or have, but have not stabilized in their use. We constantly receive confirmations of “XXX has joined Telegram”, but if you check his last connection in a couple of weeks, it may coincide with his baptism in the alternative app.
Uri Martinich , CEO of the online reputation agency ROI , explains it very well: “This app is so ingrained in our daily lives that it is hard to imagine what instant messaging would be like without it. It is not that WhatsApp is a great innovation; really, it is not, many applications did the same thing long before; but the level of adoption is so great that when faced with the statement “I send you a WhatsApp” it is almost unthinkable to receive back a “I don’t have”» .
How to live without WhatsApp
As they say, “to show a button”. Although it is shocking to think of living without WhatsApp , there are many people who have decided not to jump through the Meta/Facebook hoop and stop using this application. For example, on HuffPost we saw a report years ago in which statements from ordinary people who did not use WhatsApp were shared. From there we can extract some quotes that help to understand the point of view of this other side of the same coin:
Can we break with WhatsApp?
“In my day to day they would not give me anything; It would be another thing to live without a mobile phone, which can be more difficult, but doing it without WhatsApp is easy”.
“I don’t need it. Years ago my circle of friends was reduced and although today it is wider, I do not see the need to use it. Who knows if in the future it will be essential for me, but now, of course, not at all”.
Even the Spanish actor and director Daniel Guzmán openly acknowledged in an interview in El Mundo in 2018 that he had been without WhatsApp for two years at the time:
“I have been without him for two years [2018 statements]. I had it, but I took it off to get my life back, to own myself, my privacy and my independence . As it is free, the content is lost. There are no filters, they send you everything and put you in groups. There were people who got upset when I didn’t answer them. Having to respond to 200 people caused me a lot of stress.”
Reasons why we would want to leave WhatsApp
The fact that we live with a mobile stuck in our hand does not mean that we cannot be self-critical and, trying to empathize with some of the previous arguments, think of reasons why we would really gain in quality of life without depending on the messaging application.
There are plenty of posts on the internet from users who tell of their experience after stopping using WhatsApp and almost all of them have come to the same conclusion: deleting this app has been a kind of healing, something almost therapeutic. The reason is clear: gain freedom (or lose control, however you want to look at that prism).
Could we get to delete WhatsApp?
It is very common to see people unable to get rid of their phones, checking it from time to time in search of a new notification on this platform (also applicable to others). At the same time, we all also have friends or contacts who send us a message and believe that this is enough to make us aware. Or they “spy” if we are still awake, if we have read the message and have not been able to answer, etc.
This generates a kind of obligation, a response commitment that many times we do not want to face and in other times it would have been easier to get rid of responding so instantly. If they know you’re online, they’re practically forcing you to give an answer. Unlike other social networks, in WhatsApp there is not even a “logout” , so the disconnection in the app does not really exist beyond pausing notifications or silencing them.
Another great reason to live without WhatsApp is the issue of data held by Facebook . Allowing Facebook to process WhatsApp user data is a constant soap opera between the European Union and the corporation now known as Meta. Indeed, trying to safeguard our personal data could lead us to other open source applications, since these allow them to be audited and hardly have any data on their clients.
