Comment by lxgr

Not for everyone.

Anyway, I got asked to provide a "real" email address by support at my mobile provider.

I gave them a yahoo email.

Here, for a lot of profesional (from medical doctors to plumbers) the only contact is a WhatsApp numbers, no email, no real phone.

At work, 70% of the messages are by WhatsApp. We have like 10 buildings distributed in a 3 million person city, like 3 miles away from each other. So there is a lot of global coordination (mostly by WA). Also inside each building each subgroup of TA (like Algebra+Monday-Thursday+Morning) has one WA group, and the students have an unofficial WA per course.

We even have a WA group for the "HOA" of my home. (It's an apartment.) People can't maintain a mailing list or use CC correctly, but can use WA.

And there is another WA for the parents in each course of my children in primary school. Everything is discussed there, in particular invitations to birthday parties. Also, the school has like 3 official methods to send info (that is very confusing), but someone kindly repost all the info in the WA group.

Also, WA has a few aventajes: [1]

* If someone sends a message, they get angry if you don't reply in less than 5 minutes.

* If you realize something a Saturday at 11:30 pm, you can't send a WA about that, because the other person will think you expect them to get out of bed/party to reply.

* You can't mark a message as unread to reply it later or in a few days.

* It's even more centralized than email

[1] /s