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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

It's been mentioned before in other articles, but I don't think it can be understated how much iMessage makes it difficult to be the "odd man out" if you're on an Android phone. And it's not just about teenagers, and it's not about "green bubbles".

I recently went on a vacation with friends, 4 other folks on iPhones and me on an Android. Our group chat experience almost made me consider getting an iPhone. The inability to do emoji responds, and the fact that shared videos always looked like shit on my phone were just 2 of the examples. And I'm well past middle age! I can imagine what it feels like to be a high schooler or young adult feeling like the reason the group chat experience is sucking is because "you're the one with the Android".

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As much as I hate promoting Facebook products, "let's make a WhatsApp group" seems to be the socially-acceptable solution to this. Everybody has it installed and always seems to be happy to switch communication over to it if somebody in the group suggests it.

This is really where Facebook can excel against Apple. Although I do prefer my messages to be more like emails and texts - not platform-bound. Currently I have to have Whatsapp, Messenger, Viber, Telegram, Signal to talk to diff groups of people. Why isn't there a unified protocol and system?

Because every company wants its own walled garden. They think it's increasing their market cap.

No way I let Facebook get access to my phone contacts. I guess this is worth billions for them, because it’s a huge social graph they were missing. Interestingly the option to use the app without giving away all your contacts has been removed years ago. It tells a lot. Note that Signal still works without your contacts.

So, you would never give up your contact list to one mega corp, but readily give it away to another. How do you made that decision? Asking not rhetorically and without sarcasm.

Huh? I didn’t give away my contact list. Neither to Facebook nor to Signal. As I said you can use Signal without allowing access to contacts. You can enter telephone numbers directly. Was I being unclear?

You gave your contacts either to Apple, or to Google, by using their OSes.

I would expect Apple not to sell this data. They don’t need to, and the bad press if it gets exposed could loose them more money. Their business model doesn’t require it.

Facebook is not selling this data too, afaik. It's too valuable. They are using it to target paid ads. Apple's ads business is still in its infancy, but it will inevitably grow bigger to justify their share price. I beleive, however, that at least their music recommendation system is lavishly fed on their social graph data.

I think this is only really true outside of the US. I only have WhatsApp installed because I've spent time outside the US (Africa, specifically) and it's defacto standard there. I literally never use it to talk to people in the US, nor do I know anyone else here who uses it.

I'm well outside the US (Eastern Europe) and have never needed WhatsApp. I can talk with all the people I know over Google Hangouts or Facebook Messenger. Perhaps it's also an age thing? I guess the youngsters use WhatsApp.

Also from EE, now in central EU. Everyone uses WA and Telegram, nobody on SMS

How far east are you?

Oh I'm not very far East, actually I'm from Central Europe. The Brits kindly told me there was no such thing as Central Europe, just West/East, so I stick to saying that on the internet :)

I'm from the Czech Republic and often spend time Poland. No one I know forces me to use WA or Telegram, everyone's either on G Hangouts or FB messenger.

Oh wow! Hangouts! Big surprise tbh :)

Whatsapp is the number one app in most EU countries. It's not age but the fact youve clearly never socialized outside of your country (or with foreigners).

It's really interesting reading these comments. I'm in Australia, more of my friends use iphone (but it's close), nobody I know uses iMessage though, everyone uses WhatsApp. I had to go read about iMessage to understand the context here. Not a fan of Google but this stuff is not endearing me to apple at all.

Also in Australia, all my friends either use Facebook Messenger, Signal or Telegram, in descending order of popularity.

> It's not age but the fact youve clearly never socialized outside of your country (or with foreigners).

You couldn't be more wrong. I've lived in Czechia, Poland, the Netherlands, and the UK. I've played go competitively at a European level and have travelled a fair bit and socialized with nerds all over. Name a European country, chances are I know several people there.

Most people here have both FB messenger and WhatsApp (and likely Instagram), so if you have one of those you're fine. I've tried not to use /any/ facebook product for a while and that's when I ran into bubble color issues.

Indeed, I simply tell people I don't have WhatsApp and we usually end up with FB messenger. My claim was not that I don't know people who use WhatsApp (I do!) but rather that FB messenger + G Hangouts about covers everyone for me.

for reference, i'm in canada.

SMS/iMessage is always everybody's first choice for communication here, i wouldn't say whatsapp is the dominant communication platform or used for in-country communication on a regular basis, but everybody seems to always have it installed or if they don't have it installed they know about it and are willing to install it.

I use iMessage. I haven’t used a Facebook product in at least a decade, and am not starting now.

WhatsApp?

What is this, 2010? It's all about Discord now bb (who refused to be bought by Microsoft BD)

Has Discord become the dominant platform for bilateral messaging anywhere? I've never heard it being used outside of crypto and gaming chat rooms.

I talk to my friends on Discord almost exclusively, though one of the communities I'm in is also bridged to Matrix. I do not do crypto or gaming really.

We use Discord at a small startup. It's nice because we can easily get our external clients on and make rooms for giving them customer support without going through the janky slack process. We also have public channels so people can come by and report bugs or ask for help. Highly recommend Discord. It's a great product.

discord is great if i want to talk to weird gamer dudes. not so much if i want to talk to my mom.

WhatsApp is a fantastic app. Kudos to people that work on it and hold themselves up to high quality. It is smooth and had zero issues for using it over a decade.

This whole green bubble seems to be very much an American phenomenon, I don't think it's the one responsible. Outside the US people just use WhatsApp.

Agreed. This was a hard one for me to accept, because being in tech, I am fully aware that iMessage is a software gimmick to lock people into the ecosystem. There is no reason, technically, that things have to be like this, and I dislike Apple strongly for this. But it works, because here I am on my iPhone.

This is totally US problem. Any other country - no one even consider using proprietary OS chat app. Everyone uses either WhatsApp (Europe) or Telegram (exUSSR, Middle East).

These are just more proprietary apps. I think you mean cross-platform.

Yes, by proprietary I meant platform-walled, thank you for clarifying.

You could just ask everyone to install Signal or even WhatsApp? They're friends of yours, so it seems like the least they can do for you.

Either you have especially pliant friends, or you've never tried to do this.

what's the alternative? of all the friend groups i've had only _one_ has ever been among a group that has all iphones. i'm having a hard time imagining that, in a world of 70% android share, finding yourself in a group that can actually make use of the iOS-only stuff could ever be the _norm_? like, the statistics of this just don't make sense to me unless the OS distribution is _extremely_ skewed along a handful of metrics and you find yourself at an extreme end of multiple of those.

I guess "pliant" is one way to describe being generally open to new things.

Agreed. It's not just convincing all (or even most) of your friends, it's getting them to convince all their friends to switch (and so on)

It is OK to use multiple apps to chat with your friends.

Sure... until the day you want to set up a group chat

In this context it was just about having a group chat with your vacation friends.

WhatsApp, Messenger, or even Instagram are all potential alternatives. All from the Facebook family.

> All from the Facebook family.

I think that makes plenty of people on HN hesitant to adopt those

I mean, every other IM software is an alternative. The point is that how do you get everyone on the same platform.

Which is why I mentioned those three in particular, pretty easy to get everyone to use one.

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