I'm from China where WeChat dominates everything and SMS are nothing but to receive verification codes. Almost everyone here use WeChat as their contact and Contacts.app is merely opened no more than once a month. This phenomenon is common from giant cities, like Beijing and Shanghai, which are at least as developed as NYC or SF, to small cities in the rest part of the vast country, which are absolutely 3rd or even 4th world.

I agree with your point that in some countries people don't use Email and that's the face in China as well. But people use phone numbers just for register other services, as the online identity. We don't use SMS, and we prefer WeChat Audio over phone calls when it's available.

I think you really need to check how people use Internet in India, Indonesia and other Asian/African countries. I doubt anyone uses laptop or desktop PC unless it's needed for work. And Internet cafe is a thing of the past.

Having wifi but no cellular signal is such a rare usecase.

What I'm saying is that telephone number as ID is fine, but non-telephone number as ID should be supported, too.

They should be trying to include everyone, telephone and non-telephone users alike.

I am from the same place and what what_ever is trying to say, I think, is that in these places mobile number is pretty much the identity and username and emails are largely irrelevant for the majority and when I say that majority that's like overwhelming majority and they are coming online for the first and they really don't have time or any interest to learn about email and messaging protocols.

For example, we recently launched UPI payments - that's like a banking address sort of thing (you can send from it and request too) and you usually get your UPI address like this "9876543210@upi". The number part is simply the 10 digit mobile number and that's it.

But those things don't sell here. Maybe businesses and professionals buy it but not regular folk. All of them are buying smartphones in millions and going online everyday. Cellular signal is the norm all over the country and we have around 80% of it as villages. So I'm pretty sure all of those use cases come at a distant second. Please read about the impact of Jio in India.

> Please read about the impact of Jio in India.

I read this piece [1] which centers on Jios impact on the telecom industry. It states that the rate of digitalization has been boosted, but doesn't really detail the societal impact. Do you recommend any particular article?

[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/3f1fe4d6-e4e0-11e7-a685-5634466a6...