No. Not even I can delete Whatsapp. If you have the phone number of anyone on planet earth, then you can be certain that they can be reached on Whatsapp. In some countries people will not check their SMS app, but will check Whatsapp.

Telling people to contact you using other platforms doesn’t matter, they’ll just text you less often, and will most likely not see your messages, because people tend to clear their notification panel very often, and check the messages they got by opening Whatsapp at some point of the day.

Telegram has been successful in some Asian countries, especially Arabic ones, but still, not comparable to Whatsapp. Even though I prefer signal, I convinced a lot of people to switch to Telegram, just because fuck Facebook (Meta).