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This. Some people just don't realize how pervasive and essential WhatsApp is in some countries, mine included.

I'd much rather use Signal but that's not realistic.

But isn't it a timebomb waiting to blow up eventually? Like, Meta fucks something up with it and there is nothing you can do.

IIRC South Korea used to be fully depedent on a horrendous AcriveX applet running only in Internet Explorer for all their online services, yet they eventually managed to get rid of it. It should be possible here as well.

If WhatsApp does something really bad tomorrow, the population will probably migrate to Telegram very quickly, as it seems to be the 2nd most popular app for the category there.

There was a time where IRC was the most popular way to chat, and then MSN became IM default. Then people 'pinged' with BBOS. At one point, WhatsApp became the default, and just now Signal got popular, [1] thanks to Donald Trump.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/1j38sgw/signal_is_t...

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