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Comment by otalp | Hacker News Reader

I fail to see how this will seriously damage them. They already own the two biggest alternatives to facebook - Instagram for pictures and WhatsApp for communication. More people are using their services than ever before and more people are getting access to the internet in developing countries.

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People in US don't really use Whatsapp.

iOS users do use iMessage and Android use Hangouts.

Do android users actually uses Hangouts? I have a couple of friends on it but my understanding is that Android users (like myself) just stick with standard SMS/MMS in the US. Patiently waiting for Universal RCS to take off...

I know this is just anecdotal, but my friends and I do heavily use Hangouts.

It doesn't have enough functionality on its own, but I've augmented our experience with a chatbot powered by https://github.com/hangoutsbot/hangoutsbot.

Obviously I don't think that this experience is typical, not everyone is a programmer or has a server on which to run it.

Nope. Hangout is not at all a convenient app. Main Android apps after Whatsapp are Telegram, Kik, imo and WeChat.

Hangouts also does SMS. And, on Nexus phones at least, it does it by default.

I don't see many people in the US carrying Android devices. Everyone I see seems to have iPhone. Android is more concentrated in Asian and South American countries IMO.

iOS and Samsung’s U.S. market share is now tied [...] iOS is up 3.7 percentage points year-over-year, to achieve 35 percent market share, while Samsung only grew 0.8 points, reaching a 35.2 percent share [...] Android is still far ahead in the U.S., with a 63.2 percent share to iOS’s 35 percent.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/13/ios-and-samsung-market-sha...

We non-US people will never understand this, sorry. Instead of staying in a single cross-platform system US people prolonged for other ~5 years the use of SMS that was non existing here for a long time, also paying the highest costs in the world per SMS more or less (AFAIK you used to pay even for receiving), and now are picking OS-specific platforms.

Also true for banking — The prominence of Apple and Android Pay is a direct response to the U.S. banking industries anti-competitive prices and poor adoption of global standards. Broadly speaking, Europe and SEA had contactless EMV chip payments well before the vendor-specific smartphone solutions.

The rest of the world does.

Don't forget Telegram is gaining tractions lately. I just registered Telegram and hope Whatsapp die!

I think Telegram will have its own big scandal in the next few years

What makes you say so? I fell Whatsapp will hit a scandal first.

That's a non-sequitur.

Good luck. Telegram is owned by Russians.

The founder (Durov) is a Russian in exile, fighting Putin's attempts to control the encryption keys. Secret chats are not affected, but cloud chats would be. Durov has stated he would rather see Telegram banned in Russia than give in, but the world will know in 2 weeks.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-20/telegram-...

He's not "in exile", it was bluff/PR piece. He regularly visits St-Petersburg, and the main development office was also in St-Petersburg as of a year back right next door to the Vkontakte one.

Durov is a very shady person, I wouldn't trust him with anything that you may want to keep private. Check out how a story by ex-employee of his [1], it gives a lot of backstage info.

[1] https://medium.com/@anton.rozenberg/pavel-durov-sued-senior-...

This Russian shtick is really getting tiring now. It's bordering on xenophobia and Mccarthyism.

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