Comment by lurking_swe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lurking_swe | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

so how are these situations handled? i’m curious, and i’d like to understand your perspective. And i’ve traveled outside of america but thanks haha.

• you have a scheduled furniture delivery to your home, but you forgot. The driver texts you they are nearby. Then again when they arrive. You don’t respond because you forgot and you are not near your phone. Would they not CALL you to please come to the front door and let them into the home?

• emergency call after getting into a car accident, or if trapped in elevator, etc?

• waiting for rideshare pickup in a busy location where there are many vehicles and it’s hard to spot your uber / lyft. Like at an airport or after a concert. The driver may need to CALL to quickly describe where you should meet them.

• Your spouse or parent or child was admitted to the ER at the hospital. Their phone lists you as an emergency contact. You’re suggesting the hospital would use a chat app to contact you?

If your answer is just “wechat”, then that’s fine - but that basically IS the phone app in china (and many other minis apps combined into a super app) lol.

Here in Japan, you'd use the traditional phone service for those things. For normal people, those are all extremely rare events. I'm not the one who suggested eliminating the caller app altogether, I'm just pointing out that I wouldn't miss it too much if it was gone. Your prior examples were about "loved ones" and parents, and outside the US/Canada, people don't generally use traditional voice calling (or SMS texting) for those people, or really anyone inside their personal circle.

Also, we don't have Uber/Lyft here. Taxi services have their own apps (Go is the big one), and you'd use those. (Actually, we do have Uber, but I've never heard of anyone using it, and it seems to just connect riders with taxis anyway, unlike the "ride sharing" thing it does in the US.) But again, for most people, using these is rare: public transit is far cheaper, and taxis are generally expensive. I haven't used Uber/Lyft in a long time (since I was in the US), so I don't remember, but I'm surprised they don't have a voice-calling function built-in so drivers and customers aren't exposed to each others' phone numbers, as this seems like a security risk.

And this is Japan, which is generally a rather conservative country that still hangs onto a lot of old tech and practices (a lot of businesses still use faxes, crazily enough). But even here, absolutely no one uses traditional SMS or phone calling for their friends/family: they all use LINE. And making restaurant reservations using websites is very common (there are some behind-the-times places that don't support this though), something I never saw in the US.

thanks for sharing your perspective.

Not GP, but from a Southeast Asian perspective here.

> waiting for rideshare pickup in a busy location where there are many vehicles and it’s hard to spot your uber / lyft. Like at an airport or after a concert. The driver may need to CALL to quickly describe where you should meet them.

Grab (widely used in SEA) has a built-in call and chat feature for this situation so both the passenger and the driver don't reveal their phone numbers.

> you have a scheduled furniture delivery to your home, but you forgot. The driver texts you they are nearby. Then again when they arrive. You don’t respond because you forgot and you are not near your phone. Would they not CALL you to please come to the front door and let them into the home?

> Your spouse or parent or child was admitted to the ER at the hospital. Their phone lists you as an emergency contact. You’re suggesting the hospital would use a chat app to contact you?

Since WhatsApp is prevalent here, yes. Most people will call you using WhatsApp, SMS and direct calls are usually last resort (and frankly, most direct call/SMS nowadays are either credit card sales, scams, or illegal gambling ads).

got it! thanks for sharing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com