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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

This is the sort of thing that came to mind around the recent Twilio stock price drop driven by Uber's decreased use.

The whole article is about mobile messaging, but SMS isn't involved at all. I understand Airbnb does use SMS, but apparently only for specific use cases.

It's a bid sad, I think, that SMS is being displaced by either in-app messaging services or brand aggregated things like FB messenger. SMS has the advantage that if I don't like my mobile network, I could change providers and not change my address. The whole messaging space is now set to be highly fragmented.

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"SMS has the advantage that if I don't like my mobile network, I could change providers and not change my address."

Only if you live somewhere number porting is possible. I live in China, where it is not.

If I switch carriers, I'll have to switch phone numbers, but luckily iMessage, WeChat etc. can be carried to my new phone.

I think we're missing something like WeChat that has general appeal across age groups and doesn't come with FB intrusiveness. Well, and the harder part...that has all your friends/contacts using it.

One advantage of SMS I forgot: there's no gatekeeper, so any person/company can send messages without restriction.

And one disadvantage: there's no gatekeeper, so any person/company can send messages without restriction.

WhatsApp is dongled to ones phone number. Changing the phone number means loosing your WhatsApp account.

Whereas WeChat, iMessage and others aren't dongled to a phone number.

How do the WhatsApp users change their workplace? Do you use your private phone (BYOD)? Or otherwise you are screwed, right(?), when you switch the workplace, you loose your work cell phone number, and your WhatsApp account. Or is there a way to mitigate this?

You can migrate to a new phone number (and keep settings, contacts etc.) but your contacts need to save your new number in their phones. So not seamless like WeChat. iMessage May Ni be straightforward depending on which address you set as your default outgoing address, I use my personal email address, but many people use their phone numbers.

This is not accurate. I move countries a lot and change SIMs (and by extension, phone numbers) and the only time recipients note a number change is when I change handsets. As far as I can tell, new phone numbers are stacked upon the existing user ID which is ostensibly based on the handset (likely the IMEI) and nothing much changes to the recipient until that combination is broken.

Weechat's implementation circa last July left a lot to be desired as it couldn't even federate on its own network - messages I received on my iPad were not present on my Android! Perhaps they've addressed this since but (not to be deliberately contrarian) seamless is far from the adjective I'd use; indeed they seemed miles behind their Western contemporaries and more in the league of Line (another large Chinese messenger application for those unfamiliar). I understand they have a huge Asian user-base so there's presumably a gravity factor, but it certainly didn't seem like they had it together at all.

Are you talking about using temporary SIMs when traveling? In that case there's no need to go through the phone number change process.

If you are permanently changing your phone number, and want new people to be able to send you messages, then I think you need to follow the process here: https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/android/27585377

FYI, LINE is from a Japanese company.

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