News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Facebook-owned sites were down. Parent comment

Re:Facebook-owned sites were down by clydethefrog on Monday October 04, 2021 @01:03PM (#28749463)
Unfortunately Whatsapp replaced texting for around 80 % of the world.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Facebook-owned sites were down by pid-1 on Monday October 04, 2021 @01:12PM (#28749585)
Not a fan of FB, but the main reason for WhatsApp's success was SMS sucking hairy balls.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Facebook-owned sites were down by snarf21 on Monday October 04, 2021 @01:25PM (#28749785)
It didn't help that telecoms used to use SMS as an extreme profit center. I don't think WhatsApp would have taken over the way it did if SMS was always included in all plans for free. This is similar to the way "local" long distance used to be such a racket.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Facebook-owned sites were down by martinald on Monday October 04, 2021 @01:40PM (#28749971)
Most UK plans included unlimited SMS for a long time, but whatsapp still took over.

The group chat functions don't really exist in SMS (maybe in MMS but they never work properly), photos (same), whatsapp desktop, you can text when you have WiFi but no 4G (or using a different sim card when travelling), etc.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Facebook-owned sites were down by neop1x on Monday October 04, 2021 @01:52PM (#28750106)
No problem, they still have phone numbers of those people so they can send them SMS with Signal invitation. :)
[ Parent | on HN ]