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Comment by Dah00n | Hacker News Reader

I don't know where you are from but you seem very biased to your own friend or country bubble. For reference I don't know anyone at all who use WhatsApp. I use Google Chat and Facebook Messenger with a few but SMS with Google's RCS with everyone else, including my younger and much older family members.

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I live in France, and WhatsApp has a pretty big presence. Not a monopoly style one though, there's plenty of other apps used: Facebook Messenger, Skype, Snapchat, Discord.. I have friends who have family in other countries and some different apps will be dominant, like Viber, but the common theme is that the only time I've seen people use SMS is when they're unsure as to whether the other person has any other means of communication. Most importantly, I've never seen someone use Google's own non-RCS chat apps, like Google Chat, Google Hangout, Google Allo, Google Talk.. Google has had many chat apps, sometimes just different names for the same thing, but in the end, they have no users here. Google continuously tried to make a dent in that market and failed.

RCS is a non-starter if you need to do group chats with iPhone users or send them pictures without a massive loss in quality, as iPhones do not support RCS. As long as Apple refuses to support it, it will continue being a terrible choice in any country with significant Apple user base. An Android user with WhatsApp shares an identical experience with an iPhone user with WhatsApp. RCS on the other hand will drop you back to what cell phone messaging was many decades ago.

WhatsApp is used all over Europe and Latin America. Very easy to check. For example [1].

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1311229/whatsapp-usage-m...

According to statista.com 12% use WhatsApp in Denmark. As I said, living in a bubble if one believes everyone uses it.

Edit: A quick search said this from the same source:

>Using WhatsApp less often than once a month was the most common usage frequency among Danes in 2019, according to 23 percent of the service users. 15 percent used the app weekly and 13 percent used it several times a day.

Please don't joke about Denmark, it has a population of 6m. Anyway, it is easy to check what I said, I am from Latam and anyone uses WP.

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