> I will close my account.
And here lies the issue. Just you closing the account doesn't work. Your friends, your family, others you talk to on whatsapp shall also migrate. And that's the biggest issue.
I previously closed a ton of other social media accounts and guess what, my friends are still my friends and my family has not abandoned me. In fact I have more time for friends and family now. In hind-sight most social media use was just a giant waste of my time. Now people just call me or send me an e-mail when they need to contact me. Signal-to-noise is much better.
iOS users don't use iMessage since SMS are expensive, and not using Whatsapp would be social ostracisation since Android has a bigger market share than in the US.
In Mexico a lot of businesses have support numbers via Whatsapp. Heck, you can even order food and other stuff like LPG gas.
> > iOS users don't use iMessage since SMS are expensive
> But iMessage is free. It just uses your phone's internet connection, just like Whatsapp
Except when you're sending a message to someone who isn't an iMessage user, or if the "Send as SMS" option is enabled, resulting in what you thought was an iMessage becoming an SMS/MMS.
The blue/green colour difference, as well as the light grey text in the input field, isn't always immediately obvious.
By contrast, Whatsapp is always free. You can't send someone a message on Whatsapp and discover it's gone out as an SMS/MMS after the fact.
I know half of HN hates Telegram and I like it less than when I started moving (and to my defense that was before WhatsApp improved their crypto from close to nothing to state-of-the-art.)
It has served us well but I don't like the constant bragging combined with breaking a number of best practices and I'm looking for alternatives now and might start moving users to a system that stresses me less sometime during the next year. Alternatives right now are signal, matrix etc.
(Did I regret moving away from WhatsApp after they fixed their crypto? Not at all: they still uploaded all chats and sneakily tried to use all WhatsApp data to feed their spam cannon.
Matrix is certainly worth taking a look at. I always liked how whatsapp and telegram mobile apps were very snappy. That's something that is going to be fixed in riot quite soon, apparently.
I don’t know about chat, but i’m quite sure they didn’t just try to use WhatsApp metadata, but rather put it to full use. I believe they even admitted so.