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Comment by etatoby | Hacker News Reader

Isn't WhatsApp widespread enough in your circles, as a IM replacement? I thought it was quite universal.

Or is it a particular feature of iMessage that WhatsApp is missing?

I change sim card (and hence phone number) frequently for international travel. WhatsApp is horrendous for this use case. It makes me re-authenticate (or something) each time, and people have a hard time finding me. Identity should not be linked to phone number.

I do this often, too. Just FYI: all you need to do is tell WhatsApp "Never mind, I'm not actually changing my number" when prompted (which should only happen once per SIM card change). That's it. You'll continue being identified to your WhatsApp contacts by your "home" phone number (not your temporary one).

I don't have a home phone number.

I think from the fact that it was in quotes, "home" just means your default number

I don't have a default number.

You can see why I might think that forcing phone number to equal identify might be a bad idea.

I understand that I'm an unusual case, but I'm sure plenty of other people go through something similar this every couple years if and when they switch phone numbers or providers or move.

I have had the same mobile number for the past 20 years, throughout dozens of different phones and operators. This is very typical where I live (Southern Europe) where, in fact, WhatsApp is very popular.

Question: how do people you haven't been in contact with manage to find you, if you change your number every 2 years?

In the past three years, I haven't spent more than 60 cumulative days in a single country. Keeping a single phone number is a nonstarter for me.

People contact me via email. Apple's iMessage is the only chat client I've been able to use effectively, because they tie identity to email, not phone number.

Or is it a particular feature of iMessage that WhatsApp is missing?

The feature called "Built into the ROM of every iPhone".

It's not built into the ROM. iMessage got a huge update with iOS 10. If it was built into the ROM, that wouldn't be possible, because the old version would be, well, read-only.

Either way, iMessage comes by default, and every iPhone is guaranteed to have it. Using iMessage instead of say, Whatsapp means I don't have to download yet another app and sign up for yet another service and search for yet another user(not to mention possibly giving away personal information to Facebook) when I can already use what's already on my phone.

Thanks, Captain Pedantic. Pretty sure folks get the idea despite the egregious inaccuracies in what I wrote. (And, as an aside, I knew that when I wrote it.)

For me, the main feature of iMessage is that Facebook isn't gobbling up all of my metadata.

In the US, I know 0 users of WhatsApp (excluding work friends from other countries). It doesn't have nearly the market penetration of even something like GroupMe as far as I can tell.

I know lots of people here in the US who use WhatsApp, but yeah, many of them are from other countries. Even people born in the US, with families/friends outside the US, use it heavily.

Sorry for late reply, just saw this. Nobody in my circles uses WhatsApp, so nobody uses WhatsApp.

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