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Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

Trouble for them is that even with WhatsApp Telegram is on their heels. My wife has a lot of her professional and academic groups in telegram and she loves things like bots and channels, not to mention their Mac desktop application

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There are countries where whatsapp has pretty much become a utility and synonymous with „phone/sms“. Portugal is one of these countries.

Romania as well. Just to give an example, I recently needed some documents printed (WFH = no printer...) and found a corner shop where I just shared the docs over whatsapp with them.

Pretty much all of LATAM Whatsapp is more ubiquitous than anything else.

Phone calls still exist, but for most people Whatsapp seems to have overtaken SMS even here in Germany (From what I’ve heard, I’m not a WA user)

And India. Most businesses run their customer service off Whatsapp, including nation-wide telecom outfits.

Netherlands too. Some companies (KLM for example) offer WhatsApp as another channel for customer support over these days. And you can even contact the Dutch government over WhatsApp (plus Facebook, Twitter, email and phone).

Israel too.

Although doing my best to get as many people as possible to use signal.

Telegram has image issues though, in Germany it's most widely known as a safe haven for drug dealers, Islamist terrorists and especially the far-right and anti-vaxx faction since its reluctance to intervene against problematic content and its non-compliance with the German anti-hatespeech law NetzDG.

As a result, there are discussions about fines which can reach up to 55 million € and even a complete ban (https://www.br.de/nachrichten/netzwelt/telegram-droht-aerger...).

And here I am just using Telegram for Tech, Furry, and Kink servers. Most of the people I know only use it for that as well lol.

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