Why WhatsApp bombed in the US, while Snapchat and Kik blew up — Quartz

pps like WhatsApp, Viber, and Line can enter Asian or European countries and go from zero to millions of users with a simple value proposition: free text messages. But in The US, that value proposition meant nothing. So it stands to reason that the two most popular chat apps in the US (excluding Facebook messenger) got big for reasons other than free SMS. Snapchat and Kik both offer privacy, or at least appeal to a teenager’s concept of privacy.