Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

I have/had a Facebook account with a phone number. The account was left unused for a few years. Recently, I used my E-mail to reset its password, unfortunately, since the account was abandoned for a long time, the system flagged my activity as "suspicious" automatically, and asks me for confirmation using my phone number. But I no longer own that number. And from the customer Q&A forum, I realized I was not the only one - it is almost impossible…

This is much like Patrick's "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names". http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

I'd like to add 16.: For number recognition, you only need to care about locale-native phone numbers. My phone is running with English locale set because German translations of apps (and even Android itself) are more often than not useless. I'd still like to have local phone numbers recognized, instead of having them split in two numbers just because that's apparently the US format.

> In Egypt, it is common for phone numbers to be written in native digits. If you get a phone number into your database correctly and no one in your company can ever figure out how to call it, was there any point?