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Comment by ronsor | Hacker News Reader

Every time the "backwards Americans are still using SMS!" snark comes up:

* SMS is cheaper in America than in Europe where carriers gouge their customers for it.

* Usually this means the non-Americans are just using WhatsApp (owned by Meta/Zuckerberg) instead, which is hardly something to be proud of.

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I don’t know a lot about the rest of Europe on this, but here in France it’s been more than a decade SMS are unlimited in mobile plans, and these plans are quite cheap.

We also have free roaming in the whole Europe.

Whatsapp came out 16 years ago. Yes, the main driver for adoption was avoiding fees. They still emphasize it being free to this day.

The adoption of messaging apps caused a lot of carriers to reduce or eliminate the SMS fees, as they saw the business was evaporating.

Carriers actually massively jacked up SMS fees, just not for consumers.

One of Signal's main cost centers is activation SMS messages. For many other small players it is a significant factor too.

Ignoring pride, WhatsApp has major advantages over SMS/MMS, including high-quality media, group chats that actually work, free international messaging, video calls, and (unless they're lying) encryption.

I would be pleased if everyone who uses SMS with me switched to WhatsApp. I would be more pleased if they switched to Signal, but the UX benefits of either one are significant.

Finding and eating roadkill is cheap too, free even. Free protein in this year? Yeah, I'd rather do that than use fucking SMS for anything.

Dogs eat roadkill and poop. Dogs are very popular. You may have a point!

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