alt Hacker News> Maybe whatsapp has some use
WhatsApp is a real hard breakup in much of the world. It's the defacto standard for communication around here, and even a bunch of businesses use it exclusively. One can hope the EU will eventually mandate unlimited SMS on cellphone plans, but I don't see WhatsApp being dethroned another way
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> One can hope the EU will eventually mandate unlimited SMS on cellphone plans, but I don't see WhatsApp being dethroned another way
I doubt it.
Here in France, cell plans have had unlimited SMS for a very long time now. Yet, WhatsApp still is extremely widespread. Now, I'm not the most socially connected guy around, so I may not be attuned to any new developing trends in the matter, but IME it doesn't seem to lose any popularity, and something like 95% of the people I interact with on WhatsApp are locals.
The UX and feature set of WhatsApp is much better than SMS. India has practically free SMS but WhatsApp remains pervasive.
Unlimited SMS isn't the solution. In fact most of the countries where Whatsapp is dominant already have unlimited SMS (probably because pretty much nobody is using it anymore).
What I'd like to see is interoperability so that I am not forced to use Whatsapp because everyone else is using it and my friends in the US aren't forced to buy an iPhone just to use iMessage