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Comment by jimkleiber | Hacker News Reader

What I think keeps me and many of my friends in East Africa hooked on WhatsApp is the ability to post statuses (stories). It gives me a strong reason to come back to the app as it helps me with conversation starters. I frankly might love if signal has it.

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You can post stories in WhatsApp? TIL, I had no idea.

What other apps are common among you and your peers?

Yup, called Statuses. In iOS, it's the bottom left corner of the menu, click that and you can add a story near the top next to My Story. Probably similar UI for Android.

> What other apps are common among you and your peers?

Ironically, I'm in the US but used to live in East Africa and have lots of friends out there. So I'm not sure what's too popular out there nowadays besides WhatsApp and TikTok. Some apps probably for managing mobile money, but not sure.

I'd be extremely curious to hear about any the money management apps (even if you're not sure which one is dominant, or the information out of date). I'm guessing the main apps in the US (Venmo and Paypal) don't even operate in East Africa.

Ahh, well, I'm not sure of any new players, as of a few years ago most of the telecoms have their own form of mobile money transfer. It mostly started in Kenya with m-Pesa years ago, where people could send money thru USSD codes. Now these companies have apps to do it, like Airtel, Safaricom/Vodacom, MTN, Togo, etc. Some companies in West Africa appear to be going hard for the market in consolidating across telecoms, like Paystack and Flutterwave, one of whom I think got investment from Stripe and the other from Visa I believe.

Facebook added stories to Facebook itself, Instagram, and Whatsapp a few years back, almost certainly in an attempt to claw some users away from Snapchat.

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