For me, Google video search, Google books (Internet Archive is good, but doesn’t always have the same stuff), Adobe InDesign (but in the process of learning LaTeX), and Typewise. As for the Google stuff, I liked Whoogle a lot, but almost all their instances seem to have been blocked or shut down. Also, apologies if this is repeating an earlier post.
Why is this? I hear this a lot, but I don’t understand
As much as I try to encourage alternatives, most people where I’m from use WhatsApp for everything these days and has been that way for the last ~5 years. I might get about 10 SMS messages a year but possibly thousands of WhatsApp messages.
In some countries, government employees themselves use WhatsApp to communicate on their work phones. You have a query? Schedule an in-person visit in 6 weeks, or fire up WhatsApp, your choice. Fortunately some also use email, but WhatsApp still tends to be quicker.
It gets slightly worse when you’re looking for a job, and the only way to get hired, is to talk to someone through WhatsApp. Don’t want to? No job for you; next!
At least here in Germany it is like that. if you got a new number or whatever you are 99,9% certain that number is on WhatsApp it’s inevitable its the main source for chatting for everyone. So if you’d want to switch platforms youd have to convince a lot of people and most would not be ready to do that since why bother when you can just use WhatsApp?
Can’t speak for any country but my own (Brazil)
The reason WhatsApp is such a thing here is an interesting little historical path.
See, texting never really took off here in Brazil. Because phone service providers would charge per individual message. And while the charge was like 5 cents per message, that shit builds up. So unless you’re rich… You won’t be texting.
So when smartphones, and with them, data plans (that offered very little data, around 4 gigs is the average nowadays, it was a few megs back then) came around, internet-based messaging services became our texting. Because if you have, idk, 512 megs of data in your plan, that’s not a lot but it is more than enough for messaging over an app.
WhatsApp was the one that got popular, no idea why.
It was popular with the youths™ first in the early 10s, then families hopped on, dragged in by their young-adult kids no doubt, and then… Everything! Because once the Boomers had learned how to use this one app, every business under the sun realised it could serve their purposes as well. And eventually… So did the government.
You want to order pizza? WhatsApp. Want to contact a government agency? WhatsApp. Want to schedule a doctor’s appointment? WhatsApp.
Now, I got my friends and family on Telegram, largely because Telegram has nicer features (still closed source though grumble grumble) but I still need WhatsApp for work. It’s how I talk to everyone: The team, the boss, the contacts, etc.