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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...

You missed out some vital context from the source of that statistic:

> The number of outgoing SMS and MMS messages sent in the United Kingdom (UK) fell to 48.68 billion in 2020, from a peak of 150.83 billion in 2012.

> The fall in the number of SMS and MMS messages sent over mobile networks in the UK, coincides with a surge in popularity of apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Globally, WhatsApp added 1.3 billion monthly active users from April 2013 to December 2017, replacing the need for sending SMS messages for many users.

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

Trust me, yeah someone's grandparents who don't own smartphones might use SMS, but the vast majority of the population does not. The stats are right there.

Also note that number of SMS messages sent is not the same as number of people using SMS as a form of communication. Most texts are sent by bots either for legit things like 2FA codes or less legit things like phishing.

WhatsApp has no motivation to use SafetyNet. For one thing plenty of their users use cheap Chinese phones that aren't actually Google certified (but come with the Play Store anyway) and they know this full well from their analytics.

For another, SafetyNet is used primarily for DRM on streaming services and for banking or other financial apps. Absolutely no messenger uses it that I am aware of (unless you count Snapchat as a "messenger" but that's literally it).

Every FB owned app runs fine on Android devices that fail SafetyNet. No reason to believe that'll change because where's the benefit for FB?

> The number of outgoing SMS and MMS messages sent in the United Kingdom (UK) fell to 48.68 billion in 2020, from a peak of 150.83 billion in 2012. The fall in the number of SMS and MMS messages sent over mobile networks in the UK, coincides with a surge in popularity of apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

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

Thanks. Since no company is registered under that address I'd bet there simply is no company and the guy is just a sole trader under the name Six Ace Games. No official registration needed for that, you just have to report the income to HMRC (taxman) and that's it.

> Or does Google associates even if you're logged in into multiple accounts in the same browser?

Of course they do. Fingerprinting browsers is extremely easy.

The only restriction they have for unrooted phones is lack of auto updates, a mild inconvenience at worst. You also have to hit "install" on a little pop up window when you install something. That's it.

Most regular users are capable of hitting an update notification manually.

> Furthermore, no company would be asinine enough to allow bots, AI, or ML make decisions without a way to undo those changes.

Sadly this is actually the norm across all these big tech platforms these days. Algorithm bans an account, humans might give it a look later if a big enough fuss is kicked up about it, else there is no appeals.

Of course there is a button a human can press to undo these things, but the trouble is getting a human to bother looking at it in the first place.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, Discord all do the same thing.

If you have a rooted phone you probably have Magisk, it's virtually the universal go to rooting app and the easiest method of rooting. You can even still get OTA's if your phone uses the A/B update system like basically every modern Android phone.

It is managed through a simple UI that automates most of this stuff for you, and it also has a library of third party extensions you can install as easy as apps from the Play Store that apply various system mods including the Google Pay hack.

Anyone who cannot work out how to use Magisk is unlikely to have a rooted phone in the first place. As I said, Magisk is the easiest and most common rooting method used these days because it is the most simple and convenient.

You can run a script to do it for you, you don't even have to know what SQLite is, you just need to go on xda and run the script that makes Google Pay work.

Although I would argue that these concerns only apply to regular users who wouldn't bother rooting their phones in the first place. Most people who root their phones are willing to run scripts and know they need to be a bit hacky to make stuff work.

Users who are not willing to take that view shouldn't be rooting.

If your product is B2B SaaS do you really need to put ads inside your app?

It genuinely does wonders for mental health to disable notifications for social media apps. Definitely agree there.

Very sloppy for it to not even do a 301 redirect though. Even if you use one of those basic website builder services they will do that as standard.

Decided to run SSL Labs on the site out of curiosity[1] and they still have TLS 1.0 activated as well. That's just poor SSL config. A software company supposedly made up of talented coders should know way better.

[1] https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=6acegames.com

> No company information in the UK company database for either 6ace or sixace, despite a claimed address of "61,hallwicks road,Luton,Bedfordshire,London-LU2 9BG".

To be fair it is common for a UK company to have a generic name and for various activities run under it to trade under different names.

Usually however when the company is legitimate the footer of the website will say "Brand Name is a trading name for Actual Company Name Limited" where the company name will be registered at Companies House.

Not the case here, cannot see any info on the actual company, couldn't actually find a mention of that address anywhere on the site either where did you get it from?

That's a residential address for a random house in Luton. Not uncommon for a small company to be registered to a residential property, but the address doesn't seem to be in Companies House records.

Anyway I do agree this is sending off all sorts of red flags for me too, I think the post is telling a very one sided story and Google in this specific case has legitimate reason to ban that dodgy developer account.

They've gained free SEO, traffic, and publicity from this HN thread alone.

A Linux phone could run WhatsApp if the Linux distro was implemented in such a way that it could run Android apps (remember Android is basically just a runtime on top of the Linux kernel) and since AOSP is FOSS this is very doable and legal.

How commercially successful it'd be is still a different story, but it could run WhatsApp.

It is similar in the UK as well regarding WhatsApp. Not quite to the extreme you describe, but WhatsApp has 100% replaced SMS. No one uses SMS. It is all WhatsApp. People don't talk about texting they say "I'll WhatsApp you." If you join a new social circle, whether it's personal or professional, the first thing is to be added to the WhatsApp group.

The only thing I'll say about the security aspect though is the on-by-default cloud backups make the E2EE a red herring. Even if you turn it off on your own phone, it is almost certain the person you are talking to has it on. And if you turn it off it nags you to turn it back on after each update, most users will just do it to make the nagging go away, and FB know that.

Not rare at all if you sit on a train and glance around you. I see people watching movies/TV on phones and tablets constantly out in public. Very common.

It's partly the reason I got a Fold 3. Very good for on the move media consumption.

As for data use, aside from the points already brought up - ability to download for later from Netflix, certain services not counting towards data usage on some plans, etc - Netflix and other streaming services will also know you are on a mobile network and provide a more compressed stream at a lower resolution (720p with lower encoding settings being common) to reduce data usage and buffering.

This is a very US centric view. In virtually all of Europe, for instance, WhatsApp is the go to messenger and no one uses SMS anymore.

In some countries - primarily Russia, but also in Europe e.g. Germany and increasingly the UK - Telegram is also popular, and Viber is popular in African countries, while WeChat is used extensively in China, and so on... people have to use the messenger everyone else is on.

I do use Signal to chat to close friends, and Telegram has become popular enough as a second to WhatsApp that I often use it too, but as others have said it's a strong network effect.

The only other messenger I can remember having the position WhatsApp has was BBM back in the day. But as soon as BlackBerries went out of fashion it was all WhatsApp and has been ever since.

The blog post says outright they are not an American company, they are not hiding that.

Yeah the genuinely malicious apps are unlikely to be using Google ads or other services to generate revenue.

I realise this is an edge case, but if you don't have an FB account but you set one up to create a page for your business and set up ads for it etc, it'll likely get shut down very quickly by FB's algorithms. So basically if you are a non-FB user you cannot use FB ads.

If you use Magisk you can just sideload Netflix from APK Mirror or Aurora Store and you're fine. Samsung stock ROMs specifically have extra Netflix DRM checks built in iirc, but if you're rooted disabling them should be easy, I'm sure there's open source scripts on xda that will do all this. Netflix is even fully functional on GrapheneOS despite it being a custom build which doesn't pass SafetyNet, although the bootloader is locked and it's not rooted, but still it fails SafetyNet and Netflix runs fine without any tricks.

Android Pay is easy to get working on a rooted phone you just need to slightly modify one single SQLite database. There are scripts to automate this on xda for certain, I used one before on my old Pixel.

Snapchat though is a lot more tricky yeah, they do their own checks outside of SafetyNet and it's a game of cat and mouse where whenever someone gets around one Snapchat adds five more. But then how many people still use Snapchat these days? Everyone I know just uses IG which works fine on a rooted phone.

Best non-sarcastic option is to submit to the OEM app stores like Samsung Galaxy Store and Huawei App Gallery.

The manager of the company (we can guess likely the CEO since it's a small startup) was infected by a trojan that stole passwords from his computer, but they're certain it didn't infect the network because they "wiped the hard drive." And it couldn't have got to user data because that's hosted in the cloud. Of course the fact the login details are likely on infected computers makes no difference at all...

Yeah usually I am the first to grab my pitchforks against tech giants like Google but the devs are only telling a one sided story here and their business looks far from legit, and that team of amazing devs doesn't seem very competent either if they keep installing trojans.

Do you think such people go around advertising that fact?

I don't see how it's "way inferior" to manually hit an "update" button, it's a minor inconvenience at best.

15% of the consumers is, I'm guessing, based on US marketshare?

The company in the OP here is not American, and outside of the US, Android has the majority of the smartphone marketshare in most of the world.

Despite what Americans often think this is not only true for "poor countries" either. In the UK it is pretty much 50/50 between iOS and Android. Most people have either an iPhone or Samsung. Usually the flagship models.

So there's very good reasons to target Android and it is very possible OP's company is simply in a country where Android smartphones dominate the market, not iPhones.

But yes regarding the Epic thing, you can indeed submit your apps to third party app stores including ones that come preinstalled on the major brands. Samsung Galaxy Store for example.

Yeah no one outside of Google does including the developers who got banned, that's kinda the whole problem...

They could but Google's AI would likely pick it up instantly and they actually would have broken the ban evasion rule at that point so they wouldn't have a leg to stand on when accusing Google of being unfair.