Like many of my friends, I’ve been using WhatsApp for a very long time. I can’t remember exactly when I started using it with my friends and family, but it was years before Facebook bought the company in 2014.

It’s interesting how sticky these messaging apps are and how there are regional differences. It seems that the platform that first received massive traction in a particular region in many cases still is number one in that region.

WhatsApp is the clear leader in Europe and South America, but in the U.S. iMessage rules (probably due to iPhone’s dominant market share). The most popular messaging app in Japan is Line, whereas in China it’s all about WeChat.

In the latest episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast, John Siracusa proposed an interesting thought experiment: What if everything was rebooted and you’d have no prior knowledge or experience of messaging, how then would the usage of messaging apps turn out?

One thing is probably certain, which is that iMessage would not be number one in the U.S. After all, in many aspects iMessage is inferior to its peers and if someone in your network doesn’t have an iPhone, group chats are a mess.

About a year ago WhatsApp issued a new privacy policy, which wasn’t particularly clear and was widely misinterpreted to mean that WhatsApp would be sharing more sensitive personal data with its parent company Facebook. The change prompted a fierce backlash and many users wanted to switch over to Signal.

Me and my friends actually tried to move over several of our group chats to Signal, but all of those attempts failed. A year later, all our chats are back on WhatsApp. Signal simply wasn’t as convenient as WhatsApp and we never managed to get everyone onboard. Using WhatsApp was so habitual that we just couldn’t make the switch work.

There you have that stickiness in action.