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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

Which countries? It has zero use in the UK (apart from for stuff like parcel deliveries and 2FA). We're 100% WhatsApp.

No we're not.

There's a lot of people here claiming that their personal use is representative of their country, or of Europe as a whole. I get SMS from a lot of people. You don't, probably because a lot of the people you know are on Facebook/Whatsapp and it's more convenient for them to stay with that platform. That doesn't mean that they don't use SMS for anyone else. It just means that you are bubbled.

My experience of mobile messaging the UK is different to yours as might be expected in a country of 60+ million.

The stats show a significant drop as mobile data became cheaper and richer services became available, but still quite a lot of traffic.

I suspect that the people I see using Nokia and Samsung dumb phones will continue to use SMS, so traffic will fall to a sustained tail.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/271561/number-of-sent-sm...

2FA, NHS, gov.uk reminders, a large %age of my social group...

WhatsApp is a closed protocol owned by Facebook. It has its uses but relying on it is a mistake.

It's down from the peak, but 40 billion SMSes were sent in the UK in 2021. I would be staggered if this number was majority B2C/2FA.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/271561/number-of-sent-sm...

I would be staggered if it wasn't majority spam, OTPs, and automated reminders.

Born & raised in the EU, have had a phone for 25ish years. Have never encountered SMS spam. Most I've had is 3 or 4 cases of SMS phishing attempts (which isn't spam).

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