I often think people in the US don’t realise how big WhatsApp is outside of the States. I scrolled through my SMS messages for the last six months and didn’t have a single message from a human, only automated services. It’s all in WhatsApp and Signal.
I’m a bit glad that WhatsApp never caught on here in the US. I’ve heard nothing good come out of that platform ever since it was bought by Meta, and I don’t even know how regulators allowed that to occur in the first place.
In China we mainly used WeChat, which I can’t say is any better. Signal is fine though and works well for me. I just wish I could get more people I know to use it instead of Discord.
Inside it as I need to for things like social groups and social groups. Meta and tracking aside it’s a great app. Works well, reliable. Good group messaging features and community features, for multiple groups. Cross platform and no ads.
In Indonesia it’s used for booking activities and events. In India it’s used for payment with GPay.
I prefer whatsapp to telegram and discord, and especially WeChat.
I definitely try to force people onto signal but apart from that whatsapp is decent. Whatsapp collects your metadata, and likely sells it, but your messages are encrypted using the signal protocol, which makes it better than discord, telegram, or WeChat, in my view.
And especially better than the alternative my american friends like to use, which seem to be snapchat and instagram messages.
Interesting as I’m the opposite. I refuse to have WhatsApp cause Meta.
All my messages are done in SMS or iMessage. I will miss out on some group chats but I couldn’t care less.
Tried Signal, but getting my friends to use Signal is as difficult as getting me to use WhatsApp.
Yeah I only get missed call messages, I used sms once last year when internet didn’t work on one end. I can’t even scroll through the last six months like you because the entire year fits on one page
It really doesn’t make sense to let Meta get away with individual apps. Everything from them is a very large platform and they should be treated like that.
Playing devils’ advocate here: Sure, the Facebook ecosystem is one giant platform, but WhatsApp is completely cut off from Facebook (at least Meta says so, and I highly doubt that myself). But, were that true, I wouldn’t be against treating them as seperate platforms.
In any case, Facebook is a “very large platform”, which at the very least means auditing. Auditing should turn up any “hidden” connections between WhatsApp and Facebook proper. I hope the DMA has enough teeth to do what it’s supposed to.
The hidden connection is “the same owners” and “the same company financing operations”. Even if there were no data connections, the sheer amount of money Facebook can shovel into it’s other enterprises would be anticompetitive. So a little bit of regulation would go a long way
