I've seen major airport operations in India run off of WhatsApp groupchats and forwards between chats. People will gravitate to what they know lol.

Oh, that's is terrifying. How is there any oversight into an operation running on WhatsApp?

There isn't. That is why the UK government likes it for their use, but wants to ban or backdoor parts of it (E2EE) for everyone else.

Ah don’t worry they’re claiming they only used it for coffee orders and such ;)

In India, anybody can get a business account, which allows you to setup a catalogue of things, services, and you can pay inside app through underlying UPI interface (government operated quick guaranteed no-return money transfer). I have booked cars for rental, I have bought grocery, pizza, shoes n stuff.

That's crazy. I'd never use something like that to order anything but each their own I suppose...

You're not going to like WeChat then either

You don't have a choice - in India it's as ubiquitous as paypal is here.

Also to what actually works, unlike the Enterprise turd sandwiches they are supposed to use.

One of the companies I interned was using Whatsapp but then migrated to Teams/Slack.

Employees did not like it and after a few months everyone migrated to Whatsapp.

I've seen Thai police stations use WhatsApp groups for distributing photos of paperwork and other information.

Oh, and the core of the UK government runs on WhatsApp https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jun/02/senior-torie...

> the core of the UK government runs on WhatsApp

Wow, I'm surprised a government IT would allow this. Any corp I've worked for strictly prohibited use of messaging tech that's not self-hosted.

That makes me wonder, what _do_ governments around the world use for p2p communication?

phone calls, zoom, hosted email servers, private islands, etc usual stuff.

* * *

Have worked with gov in a few countries and seen lots of Teams usage.

To my horror, the Irish government also uses WhatsApp quite extensively.

There's a fairly wide history of self hosted Government Microsoft Exchange servers ending in ransomware payouts that suggests that blunt self hosting rules isn't as useful as it sounds.

And right now you look can look all the big MoveIT mass exfiltration hitting a wide range of orgs that wouldn't use Sharepoint "for security reasons".

Ask the UK government…

Shadow IT systems

WhatsApp was used by the Afghan Army to coordinate military communications and maneuvers. I wouldn't be surprised if other under-resourced military forces (i.e. Ukrainian) use it as a form of communications.

See this movie's footage for Afghan Army usage: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/retrograde_2022_2

Then again, the Afgan Army was never a model of competence

You mean the one that defeated two superpowers?

Afhanistan and the Ukraine both have a little less than 40M inhabitants. (Which is around half of germany, or like 20M less than France).

The Ukraine has/had a relevant IT-offshoring sector, from Wikipedia there's around 1/3 of the soviet military industry that was sitting there (including companies like Antonow)... and they had a few years of preparation since the krim was occupied where they knew that russian secret services would try to undermine any kind of communication infrastructure.

I doubt that they currently rely on WhatsApp for military communication...

* * *

Sorry, I'm not a native speaker. What do you mean by "It's just Ukraine now". Was it always just Ukraine or hast that changed recently?

Edit: But thanks for the information :)

When people say "the Ukraine" it is taken to refer to Ukraine as a region rather than a country. I'm not 100% on why but the wording matters a lot.

yet people use slack for similar and get applauded?

I think you would be surprised at what portion of global commodities trade, and perhaps trade in general, transacts via WhatsApp.

And they can lie in the bed that they've made.

Everyone has to make their bed somewhere…

Exactly!