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Comment by enitihas | Hacker News Reader

I think you are an outlier in that regard. Almost nobody I know is using any other messaging app instead of WhatsApp, and I just graduated out of University so my social circle consists of a lot of fresh engineering grads. It is hard for me to convince even my batchmates to install signal. I think people don't want to install anything else as none of their contacts are on any other platform.

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Everybody has a certain messaging app on their phone: it's called SMS. Add one more, that's already two.

Are there good apps that support "chat room" style activities? Google Messages falls over when you try to send out mass messages. I'd like to see a sms app that allows one to have mass messaging - it's the only reason I keep WhatsApp around - coordinating with a group of friends.

Do Telegram groups, supergroups, or channels fit the bill?

https://telegram.org/faq#q-what-39s-the-difference-between-g...

SMS sucks, though.

Sure. So do centralized, mobile-only systems, where your id is a phone number.

And not just a phone number, but a phone number in a specific format.

It took me more than 10 minutes to figure out how to add a friend with a phone number from Spain. The trick was adding a space in the right place. In the meantime, she couldn't find me by my US number.

Turns out, different countries format the phone numbers differently, and Whatsapp gets confused. Just for US numbers, you have +1(xxx)xxx-xxxx, xxx-xxx-xxxx, 1xxxxxxxxxx, xxxxxxxxxx,(xxx)xxx xxxx, xxx xxx xxxx - and I don't know which one Whatsapp uses internally for ID.

For what it's worth, entering the phone number exactly as it shows up on my account info didn't work.

TL;DR: a phone number does not a good ID make.

Where are you from? I think location and Culture makes a huge difference. Whatsapp wasnt even a thing in US before Facebook bought it. France was mainly iMessages ( transition from SMS ) before Facebook acquired WhatsApp.

Then there are places like China which no one uses WhatsApp.

WhatsApp has giant user bases in India, South America, and Africa.

Here in Mexico too.

WhatsApp and especially LINE were heavily used in China until they were blocked. After that, local company Tencent's WeChat became dominant.

Since we're sharing anecdotes as qualitative data points, my experience has been the exact opposite: every last one of my friends that were on WhatsApp have migrated to Signal. I followed them. We're all US based, with two exceptions in the UK.

It really depends on where you live. If you're in say, India, then sure, what you've said is probably true. But it's certainly not true everywhere in the world.

I tried to get my friends who use WhatsApp to switch to Signal during the big Delete Facebook movement... I got a lot of pushback. It did not happen. :(

pushing people to change habits is hard...

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