Hacker News Reader

Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

Does this require a phone number like the rest of Open Whisper Systems products?

Ugh, I hate this phone number as identify business. My pone number changes every time I move and I have to keep paying to have it. I see the benefit to a number that I can easily share but I don't like tying it to the telephone system.

I'll keep using something like hangouts that allows me to keep my contacts when I move as well as a number of other benefits.

Why does it change? In my experience most people keep their first cell phone number for their entire lives. Area codes are indicative of nothing, except where you lived in 2005 [1].

[1] https://xkcd.com/1129/

If you move internally within a country, sure. But when you actually move country, you'll need to get a new sim (or be charged roaming fees).

I live in Europe, and I've had 4 different phone numbers in the past 3 years.

Not everyone lives in the US. Here's how this affects me:

* If I lose my phone, I've permanently lost my number. * Long-distance calls are a lot more expensive (about 5-10x as much). * Switch companies? Number lost again.

I've had about 5-6 mobile numbers since during the last decade.

Over here (Germany) it commonly costs 30 bucks to transfer a phone number to another provider, at least if you are on cheap plans.

Changing counties comes to mind.

I went to school and got a new number because a lot of my friends didn't have free province-wide calling and I'm about to move from Canada to Europe. So for me this is a particular concern at the moment.

Allo was announced at I/O to use your phone number as your identifier. It's a mobile-only app.

Ugh, how did this EVER catch on so much!?

Lost your phone? Got mugged? Now you've lost you only identifier on every major IM network out there. You need to contact everyone you know out-of-band and have them update your number.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com