SUMMARY
- The EU has identified WhatsApp as a gatekeeper in the messaging industry and has given it a few months to enable interoperability with other apps.
- The EU’s Digital Markets Act aims to promote fair competition and give consumers more options for alternative services.
- WhatsApp has already begun working on interoperability with other apps, potentially allowing smaller players like Signal to compete more fairly.
WhatsApp is fundamentally bad and anti-consumer because it is proprietary. When people are not allowed to understand, change and redistribute the source code, the people will ALWAYS be milked and abused in some way. Trust me. LINE is also closed source and unfree, so it would only be a matter of time until that company fucks you up and you want to switch to another messenger. The most popular open source/ free messenger would be Signal. Conceptually the most promising one in my opinion is SimpleX Chat, if you want to be a bit more adventurous
No one I know is going to change to those. LINE also has other business stuff built in for interacting with companies (customer service for my massage place, my dentist, etc.) In an ideal world, sure, but it isn’t going to happen.
I have a similar issue but I am able to use SMS for those few people, most of them are relatively easy to convince of Singla in my experience, it’s as easy as it gets, basically whatsapp in secure!