For me it’s Whatsapp. Like 99% of people i know use it so yeh… i still need it. I am considering moving the Whatsapp Gdrive backup to a local backup btw.
Google photos is also a major problem for us. We have a lot of stuff that want to migrate to different service (or store locally).
I hear that a lot about WhatsApp—that everyone they know uses it—but I’ve never known anyone in my life who does. I mean what’s wrong with your phone’s built-in dialer? Or literally any other free VoIP app if paying your phone bill is the issue? What does WhatsApp provide that alternatives don’t?
It depends where you live. Whatsapp is the default way of communicating in a lot of countries, way more popular than text messages. You might be able to get individuals to contact you another way, but if the group chat is in WhatsApp, you’re probably not going to persuade the group to change.
Thanks but that only leaves me with more questions. Why is it that way in so many countries? Why don’t they use alternatives? Do they like being slaves to Meta, having their entire lives being monitored by the company?
It wasn’t always a Meta product. Also, by the time everyone started finding out how evil Facebook was, Whatsapp was too entrenched for people to easily switch to something else, not when all their friends and family members were using it.
In a lot of places, SMS is/was more expensive (and Whatsapp seen as affordable/available) around the time Whatsapp took off. If you’re from somewhere like a relatively small EU country where you’re more likely to want to message people from other countries, there’s also the issue of international rates. So SMS had more disadvantages in some places and wasn’t necessarily as widely adopted as in the US. And some places didn’t have quite the same progression from dumb phone texting to smartphone texting that the US had, either because of costs or lacking infrastructure. More people skipped the widespread dumb phone texting phase, and internet access was expanding. So there was no reason not to use a cheaper internet-based service from a provider people didn’t think was evil at the time.
unfortunately i have WhatsApp for use with one elderly relative but if anyone else dares contact me there i reply via any other route and then block them on WhatsApp
iirc theres a strict account settings in whatsapp. It literally blocks random messages, invites from groups and individuals. For groups, you cannot be invited or mentioned. For random person, he or she needs can only contact fully until you accept their request.
Not advocating for whatsapp, its owned by a shady company lmao, but these features are pretty ok.
It didn’t take too long to get away from google. I had my first google mail account only for registering my first Android phone. It has never been my main email address and I was always annoyed by this “log in with google”, so I never used that. In return I had almost no services connected to my google mail.
Then I just flashed LineageOS and created a mail address at mailbox.org. After that, I quit Facebook, Instagram one after another, but I haven’t used those services in a while.
The hardest was leaving WhatsApp, but I now have my whole friend circle and my 80+ parents on signal, so that’s great!All in all it was a process over multiple years, as I had to learn a lot of things. But I left early enough to not get involved with the modern shit. Nowadays I flash phones for friends, running some self hosted stuff such as Jellyfin as a side hobby.
I finally ditched Windows 2 years ago, I was always afraid I could play video games anymore. But oh boy I was wrong, Linux Mint is a beast.