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Signal’s New Usernames Help Keep the Cops Out of Your Data
(theintercept.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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While I hate the dominance of WhatsApp in Europe, at least we hardly use SMS anymore. What's up with that in the US?
Why is it that WhatsApp is so big in Europe? My dad is European but lives in Mexico. Only way to get through to him when he’s in Mexico seems to be through WhatsApp.
In the USA, I think the majority of people that use WhatsApp just use it for international purposes even though there is no rate difference sending a text via SMS.
Well, it's big pretty much everywhere except for the US and China. It was the right app at the right time and due to its huge user base it's virtually impossible to get people to ditch it - even when it was bought by an evil tech giant.
It does have good and useful features though. SMS doesn't even allow group chats - that alone renders it utterly useless (I'm just ignoring it being clear text without any kind of security or privacy - those seem to be too abstract concepts for most people anyway).
Laziness.
Every phone supports SMS. It’s not all that long ago that people had feature phones, but they also supported SMS. We went through thing like Facebook Messenger, but only for Facebook users, AOL Instant Messenger but only for AOL victims. Every texting/chat app has its followers but none have become dominant enough to unseat SMS.
I don’t care what texting app I use, and SMS has sufficient features (although RCS would be better). However I care most about contacting everyone I may want to, using one texting app. That’s SMS, no contest.
Or maybe credit the dominance of Apple. I use iMessages and most people I chat with do as well. However it seamlessly Integrates with SMS so I still get all my contacts in one place