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Comment by throw310822 | Hacker News Reader

> Nobody I know in the US uses WhatsApp

> this is a problem and there are people that would like a solution

The solution is literally downloading a free app and encouraging others to do the same.

> this is still an annoying problem to me because much of my family and some of my friends use android

Then why don't you start using Whatsapp with them? It's not like in Europe we were born with it, at some point someone told us "you are on Whatsapp, right? I'll message you there" and we downloaded the damn thing. Is it an internet connection issue? (In the sense that you need to always be able to fallback seamlessly to SMSes because the connection is spotty?)

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>The solution is literally downloading a free app and encouraging others to do the same.

Absolutely not. I'll never touch whatsapp with a ten thousand foot pole. If you aren't tired of facebook ruining people's lives then I don't know what to tell you, but frankly most people who pay attention are sick of FB controlling the planet.

How about instead, you use apps that don't sell your information to literally anyone who will give them a dollar? Like Apple's iMessage.

This attitude is exactly what I was talking about!

american iphone users just want others to be iphone users

I was making fun of you. That seems to have gone right over your head. Here, I'll put it in your perspective. Facebook users (you, a whatsapp user) just want others to use facebook (spyware).

Read the username. I am not the whatsapp user lol.

Btw, Poe's law, and you are absolutely right about Europe lol. Thank you for making my point.

> I'll never touch whatsapp with a ten thousand foot pole.

Then use Signal.

I was one of the first users of signal when it first released, over a decade ago. I could not, and still can not, get others to use it. We're long past that. The choices are Google's spyware, Facebook's spyware, or Apple's locked down ecosystem, which has been proven to not be spyware (fbi requests and all that). I think I'll take the latter.

Nobody is doing that. Doesn’t matter what i do. In Europe you have a mess of country codes and to be charged fees by network provider based on the countries you’re talking to. In the US that has literally never been an issue. We never put the country code in because we’re in the same country. Lol.

Country codes or roaming fees have nothing to do with it. The reason we use Whatsapp is simply to avoid SMS/ MMS (I might have sent one MMS in my life, back in 2008) and network charges for phone calls/ video calls. Basically most of our phone communication activity is over ip, with the only exception of a minority of classic phone calls (as they tend to have better quality).

> Nobody is doing that. Doesn’t matter what I do.

Lol. Of course it matters: if you do it, by definition someone is doing it.

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