I hate phone calls, too. Mine are very essential and dry.
you could do what I did for Whatsapp: buy a new SIM with a new number. Download whatsapp and register with the new number. Then discard the new sim and keep on using the old one. You’ll have a second number not capable of receiving or making calls, but good for whatsapp texting.
Or You could just give people the name of a telegram account instead of your phone number, but not everybody has it…
Dont have any of these. Not up with the times.
If you don’t like texting, you don’t need them. But pretty much everybody has whatsapp.
It didn´t come with my phone. I thought about installing it, but couldn´t think of a reason why.
I more or less had to install it a couple of weeks ago. But in general, just keep away from all the nonsense. 
I don´t get it. It does calls and texts…you know…like my phone does anyway?
I installed it to keep in touch easily with my family. I wasabroad, and using a stranger sim. Back home I was going to uninstall it, but since it was registered with that inactive phone number, I kept it. Nobody can bother me there, even if they have my phone number.
Understandable, I also hate phone calls and tend not to answer unless I have a good reason… but I get rid of the little number right away. I hate the “unread” number way more than I hate phone calls 
And my landline has that irritating red flicker!
What I don’t get is why WhatsApp.
Still not getting it, really.
Aw, come on, guys… please let’s not turn this thread into a discussion about whatsapp… 
We all posted our pics already…
It’s not the off-topic that bothers me. It is the fact that it is about Whatsapp. 
Good for you. But I suppose I left too much implicit there. Perhaps most important that today isn’t eight or fourteen years ago, but even today doing these things internationally can be on the costlier side (e.g., I live in Belgium, my immediate family mostly in the Netherlands, some in Switzerland, my wife’s family in the US).
I’ve mostly been using Skype since '04 or '05 and in spite of its becoming an abomination in recent years I still use it. Besides that mostly e-mail obviously. But in any case like I said my point isn’t WhatsApp, but that just about anything with the same general properties is a boon over a phone in costs, options, and usability.
NB I couldn’t even do video calling with my parents on WhatsApp. They don’t have any smartphones in the house — nor should they — and WhatsApp requires a phone to run. I’m talking about generics, not specifics.
Yes? 
Discord, Slack, Google Hangouts, etc. etc. etc.
Also all the dead chat programs like ICQ, MSN, AIM, Yahoo, etc. supported it and it was plenty popular. IRC is about as old as I am and that group chat is anything but dead.
Not necessarily on texting, no.
WhatsApp has some extremely annoying properties compared to the competition, such as Discord and Skype.
I’m anything but defending it. Is that better?
That’s not true among the people I need to contact. Unfortunately, the thing they ALL have is Facebook Messenger… but I’m not on Facebook. TXT is the one thing everyone has.
Same here. (From the things that were invented in last few years Whatsapp is the most annoying thing. I “kill” and/or mute that app whenever possible…)
Hm… Is Facebook still such a big thing? Here in Germany I don’t know a person who is using the Messenger. And more and more people are using Facebook much lesser than a few years ago…
It’s me!
In turn Twitter is still much smaller than in the US. It is big thing for journalists and politicians but not so much for the average joe.
It’s used plenty here.