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Comment by mmsimanga | Hacker News Reader

South African here. Just about all notifications have moved to WhatsApp. Most school classes have a group for the parents, extended family group, immediate family group, residents association group, high school classmates group, gym class group, home town group ... the list goes on. Sounds like a lot but most groups tend to have few messages.

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Canadian here.

I have a WhatsApp account and the app on my phone with zero contacts in it. Nobody here uses it. But every time I leave the country I need it for some service or business or who knows what. It seems like the rest of the world all agreed to use this app and Canada (and I think the US) just said “naw thanks…” and have no common app or method.

What are people using in Canada? SMS?

Costco membership meetups

Apple Messages.

If Canada is similar to the US, a mixture of SMS, Discord, and iMessage. The kids use Snapchat, your aunt uses Facebook messenger or iMessage, and occasionally someone might be into Telegram although mostly scammers. Teams or Slack for official workplace or college chat groups. GroupMe was popular for college groups when I was an undergraduate though that’s long since gone by the wayside.

Most importantly, if you show up as a “green bubble” person you will be lightly teased about it, including on a date.

Yeah this is roughly the same. It’s just a smear of apps and no real assumption of anything sure to be shared.

My theory is that there is a latent hysteresis effect of past SMS and data pricing on mobile accounts that matches up with places that adopted WhatsApp and ones that didn't.

Ditto in the UK.

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