Hacker News Reader

My family lives mostly in the UK. None of them use Whatsapp. They still use SMS for random messaging, and they use Telegram for coordinated messaging. They range in age from 30 to 78. WhatsApp might be dominant, but "No one uses SMS" is almost certainly an overstatement.

View on HN

Some people, especially those who have more international contacts, will prefer to use Telegram over WhatsApp sure. It is rare to find anyone under the age of 60 who uses SMS as their primary method of communication in 2021 though. The number of SMS messages sent in the UK has dropped by over 100 billion in the past slightly-under-a-decade.[1]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/271561/number-of-sent-sm...

The page you linked says there were 48.68 billion SMS in 2020. Averaged across the population, that's on the order of 800-900 messages per person per year. Even if the actual SMS usage demographics skews older (quite likely), it's still likely that most people send at least one text per day, maybe more.

Given that the original claim was that "no-one uses SMS anymore", I think that's still demonstrably false. Your milder claim - "rare to find anyone under 60 who uses SMS as their primary messaging system" - seems likely to be true.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com