I’d rather keep using messenger than switch to signal. Nothing that requires my phone number, and even worse, uses it as primary identifier, is something I want to switch to (and no, obviously I don’t use Whatsapp either). I realize that in this mobile-centric world that makes me a grumpy old man, but for me, my E-Mail is the important ID.
I switched phone numbers a few years back and I can't use Uber because my account is tied to my old phone number and the new phone number already had an Uber account. It's so dumb.
I’m curious why you see a difference between the two? Phone companies have been giving away your phone number for years, it gets more spam then my email address at this point, which has made me disable it for all incoming calls except those in my contacts.
At this point, none of us even use phones, my family pretty much use Zoom and at work everything is Google Meet, my phone function is basically a dead function at this point.
I don't truly own my phone number. I barely control it. I can move it from provider to provider, kind of, but it's still not _my_ number – the number is a side effect of having cell service. In particular, if I move to a new country, what happens to my phone number? (Having recently done so, I still don't know: for now, I'm paying two cellphone bills, but that's obviously not a long-term solution, and I don't know what is. Port it to Twilio, I guess.)
You can make the argument that I don't truly “owns” the domain name off of which my e-mail address hangs, either, but it's a much better situation than phone number ownership. There, at least, the constraints of ownership (rental) are clearly defined, as is my ability to move it between registrars.
It sounded like you saw phone numbers as something to protect, keep private. I was asking from that frame of reference, and then pointed out how non-private they are today.
Yes I think they suck, but do they suck more or less than en email? Not clear.
They're working on being able to use it without a phone number, though doing so in a privacy-friendly way is forcing them to overcome some challenges first: https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1281353119369097217
I'm a core contributor at Status, and the team I'm on is currently developing a desktop client[1] to complement the mobile client. We have alpha builds for Linux and macOS, and soon Windows.
All I want is messenger. Status seems to do way too much. I don't want a wallet, a browser or anything else (not even to mention that I don't know a single person on macos and barely anyone on iOS)
One thing: I don't think it's unusual for a user to have little/no interest in the wallet or dapp browser. In that case they simply use it as a chat app that's focused on privacy and security while ignoring the other features.
