• Apollo2323@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    9 months ago

    Why you let people decide for you what phone you use? I moved here and every single one of my friends have WhatsApp even though they use iPhone.

    • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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      9 months ago

      Generally, people like to chat to other people using their phones. And generally, people aren’t going to install a new messenger app just for you.

      Sure, you could convince them to install Signal, after a couple of weeks. But most likely, they’ll just discuss things in the old iMessage group without you every now and then, because that’s what they use for literally everything else.

      You could add an Android phone to an iMessage group, which disables encryption and forces everyone to fall back to MMS, a protocol that was bad at its job decades ago when it was first designed. Blurry, tiny pictures, and often lacks the ability to text while only connected to WiFi because of weird carrier stuff.

      In areas where MMS has been disabled by carriers (like where I live), SMS groups are basically a copy of every message sent to every other person, and multimedia support is nonexistent. No GIFs, no attachments, only text, and it takes a moment for every message to get sent.

      Most people I know are on WhatsApp. I dislike WhatsApp, but if I uninstall it, I just can’t chat to most of my family anymore. My previous attempt to try to get them to install Signal for me failed, and I don’t think my next attempt will succeed. At least WhatsApp is more secure than something like SMS or RCS (the RCS that iPhones will eventually get, not the RCS that only works between Androids) but the reality is that there’s just no getting around other people when it comes to chatting with them.