I am German and use Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, Threema and SMS because NO ONE CAN MAKE UP THEIR FUCKING MINDS!!!1!!11!
Some people seem to be extra confusing and contact me on multiple channels based on the moon cycle or whatever the fuck.
the worst part is when they start calling ๐
based on the moon cycle
Lol, right? Wtf?
SMS/RCS or iMessage if you're asking what most people use.
Signal does end-to-end encrypted messaging, voice, and video chat.
As an American living in Germany, I have:
Everyone I know in Europe uses Signal or Whatsapp, often both. Sometimes when I suggest to Americans who live in the US that they should use one of those, they counter that I should buy an iPhone and use iMessage.
As a fellow American, fuck iMessage. I wish we were more like Europe in that regard.
A vast majority of people Iโve met through work and other social activities simply use the default messaging app on their device.
Signal for the half dozen people I actually give a crap about messaging back and forth with.
SMS for the monthly/yearly exchanges with everyone else.
Here in South Europe people mostly use Viber.
South Europe? In Italy everyone uses WhatsApp
I was surprised to read that a country in South Europe mainly used Viber. I'm not European but I'm almost definite that WhatsApp has the largest market share for chat apps in all of Europe. Maybe Telegram coming a close second
If you move a bit east of Italy, to that peninsula that should not be named, Viber gets real popular.
Signal for everything.
There are a couple people who are too lazy to get Signal, and they got iPhones, so I set up an iMessage server to forward messages to my GrapheneOS phone.
But the communication there is extremely sparse and surface level. It's basically just a touch point. The real conversations all go through Signal.
Most people I know use SMS/RCS/iMessage or Discord. My family uses Signal, but I don't know anyone else IRL that has even heard of it. I personally don't like Signal because they don't have some basic features, such as if you get a new phone, you need to export/import all of your old messages manually. If your old phone broke or your traded it in already, tough shit. If you log in on your laptop, afaik, there's no way to get your old messages from your phone. I know these were intentional design decisions to make it as secure as possible, but I would be fine with something being slightly less secure to have these QOL features.
It's chaos. Well, unless you count SMS.
There really isn't a single dominant app/service, though apple and imessages comes close. But, since that's apple only, it doesn't truly dominate in the way whatsapp does in some places.
In my local area (a rural mountain zone in the Southeast), the most common single one is telegram. The only thing that gets close is Facebook messenger, but there was a big push maybe three years ago to get people away from it, and it worked.
County wide, it's still Facebook over telegram, but not by much. Then imessage. You can even rely on apple monkeys using one or both of the others since the county school system sends on both of them as well as via SMS for major events.
My kid and most of the high school kids do discord among themselves, but still use the others away from that.
Tbh, though, I have come to prefer not having a single messaging service be dominant. It was (and still can be) a pain in the ass using multiple apps, but at least you're not totally fucked if you refuse to use whatever else the majority have decided to use because it's easier.
The only thing that gets close is Facebook messenger, but there was a big push maybe three years ago to get people away from it, and it worked.
Who led the push?
There was a huge problem with it being over used by the mayor's office as a semi official channel. When the mayor got himself into a bit of trouble, those folks that were working to get him ousted made a big deal out of him corporatizing the office of mayor and town business in that way, and it made sense to use it as a tool against him. He was trying to treat it like if he said something there, it was a done deal, and it counted as some kind of replacement for posting such things publicly.
The push was from a group of like minded residents that included the county sheriff, the chief of police, myself, and the librarian. I can't truly say anyone led the push, though the librarian would come closest. We all just got sick of him, and used what we could to get people moving against him. People were starting to hate Facebook locally because of some school drama anyway, so it was easy enough to stoke that fire.
Get people from the various town departments to stop using it, get their families and friends to help convince them if they weren't on board. If he can't reach anyone via messenger that's part of the local government, it cuts that out, and ties him into the whole arguments over school aged access to Facebook in general.
It worked! Which was a bit of a surprise to all involved. But it was the right confluence of events. He was fucking up with covid issues, fucking up the people that actually run the town on a direct basis, and doing so while being an asshole as a person. There was no way he was winning the next election, but he could fuck things up before then.
Once the entire police force officially abandoned messenger, it was a bit of a death knell. Individual officers still used it, but the group chats he was using died totally.
Small town drama, in other words.
A combination. For the tech challenged, SMS. For those a little bit tech friendly, Telegram or Signal.
Here in NL it's pretty much 100% Whatsapp, from family, friends and colleagues.
Same in germany. Some people that care a little about security might use Telegram, Signal and/or Threema, but most still use WhatsApp parallel for family and stuff
Canada's pretty close to America, so I'll answer. My family uses WhatsApp. Better than unencrypted, at least.
You're not going to get a very representative sample here. Signal is great but a lot of North Americans haven't even heard of it.
sms and discord
SMS/RCS for friends/family in meatspace, Discord for friends in cyberspace.
Snapchat still seems to be a default conduit of communication for my family members and their respective friends. I do not have Snapchat and never will. They are mildly annoyed at my stubbornness.
I have yet to meet a single soul in my local circles who is willing to install any messaging platform over any concern of privacy or security. These are very simply not important factors to any of them. It's upsetting. But, y'know, lead a horse to water, etc.
Discord continues to be a choice platform for my online friends circle. I don't know so much about any of them, but I almost never use it for 1:1 private messaging. It's there for the rare aside conversation. But its primary form of use for me is as a big town square in servers with dozens of people. It's essentially my version of going to the mall after school or to the local pub after work.
SMS text messaging unless it's a group chat/voice call for gaming, in which case it's Discord.
Really? People pay for short, unencrypted messages that can barely handle accented characters, let alone media, when there are free alternatives that are much better in the vast majority of scenarios?
Or is free sms a common thing in people's phone plans?
Pay? In the US we haven't paid extra for SMS since about 2005. Which partly explains why it's prevalent.
Almost all phone plans have unlimited texting. Or at least it seems that way.
My plan is $25/month for unlimited talk, text, and 5g data.
Pay per text plans only seemed to exist up until like 2010 at the latest.
Mostly SMS, but I have one friend who uses Whatsapp. I have Signal installed but wasn't able to convince anyone else to switch.
SMS. Universal and ubiquitous thanks to free or nearly free inclusion in phone plans. American English has no need for expanded character sets and carriers/Apple/Google have added just enough features on top that the vast majority of people aren't left wanting for more.
Instant payment was literally impossible until this summer, and given it's so new almost no bank has support for it yet. Privacy/encryption don't enter into most people's consciousness.
I just use SMS. I don't need to install anything extra or make some sort of extra account somewhere. Phone plans here have had unlimited texts for like over a decade now so we aren't spending extra money here to send texts either.
SMS is notoriously unreliable, plus insecure as hell.
As in it's known across the industry that upward of 10% of messages fail, and since SMS lacks error detection (and thereby no error correction), you have no idea when your message never arrived.
So I'm actually an immigrant (Indian) but I came over super young so I guess it counts. WhatsApp with family, normal SMS for everything else. If I could, I would use Signal for everything but it's kind of hard to get your massive Indian family to all switch from something they've used for a decade and a half.
sms
I have family who use facebook messenger but I refuse.
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