A lot of tech bros need to touch grass and realize that the rest of the world doesn’t mind giving their phone number to a chat app.
Just because the rest of the world doesn’t mind giving out their phone number, it doesn’t mean it’s harmless. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to get sim swapped and have all of my bank accounts drained because some random company with zero security measures demands I provide my phone number to use their app.
Not a big deal, there's sms verification services, they have APIs and premade libraries, cost is about ~$0.06/verification depending on which service you use, and less with bulk discounts.
Hangouts worked great until Google got bored and trashed it with Duo/whatever the other one was, that's all I was saying.
A phone number proves, and stops nothing.
If you can't detect spam from either the message, the volume or from other users reporting, then you have bigger problems.
You are focussing on the wrong point, I only mentioned that because I could get on these services with a disposable number.
