This article seems to be of the "kids these days" type, and is, in my experience, highly reflective of the millenial generation, who are by and large not teens anymore.
In Europe you'll find people using WhatsApp or Telegram; in Japan and Taiwan, LINE is king, and of course in China there's WeChat. There's also Twitter DMs. Discord has been becoming increasingly popular lately, especially among the tech/game and adjacent crowds. Nobody has used SMSes by default for years.
Source: Am US millennial in a dozen text groups.
For millenials in the USA, that's SMS/text messages. I'm a older than millenial, but too young to be a boomer. I prefer email. Boomers I know tend to prefer phone calls. "Why can't you just pick up the phone" is a common complaint.
There is a generation in-between millennials and boomers, it’s called Generation X. It refers to people born in the 70s and early 80s.
Not really. My family and other Spanish circles largely use WhatsApp. That absolutely did not exist when things got started; heck, I remember when my dad got his first cellphone, which definitely couldn't do anything but SMS. Discord is also much more recent and a big subset of my generation has had no trouble embracing it; it is probably the messaging app I use most these days, by message volume. Way back we'd have been using stuff like MSN Messenger. And since moving to Japan I've seen things shift from Skype to LINE and now slowly to Discord.
Voice calls are still popular in my family, but they have no trouble embracing different apps and ecosystems for it; I recently got my immediate family to switch to Telegram from Hangouts for talking among us, since Google botched their messaging ecosystem again (I refuse to use WhatsApp because it's by Meta but that's a me thing; either way Telegram is also an increasingly popular alternative overall).
Americans being stuck with SMS when superior alternatives have existed for ages is something unique. Then again, so much of communications infrastructure/culture in America is bizarre (Paying for incoming phone calls on cellphones? What? That one shocked me when I spent 3 years studying in the US.)
Japan is interesting because their feature phones used internet e-mail instead of SMS, but I don't ever recall seeing a client that threaded e-mail conversations like SMS clients ended up doing.
I only text/msg with family.
Am Gen X, now we're doing eldercare.
Texting and voice calls (and voice mails) are the only skills our parents know. I've tried teaching them FaceTime, WhatsApp, some cooperative social games. Nope, too late.
Once our parents pass, I probably won't even have a normal phone plan. The only other calls I get are telemarketers. Maybe switch to prepaid. For emergency services, and all these services using texts for 2FA.
For whatever reason, in my country, everybody use FB Messenger for the absolute majority of their texting. And by "everybody" I mean teenagers, young adults, parents and the elerderly.
It's only if you've had prolonged stays in other countries (or is exposed to international communication in other ways) that people will be familiar with WhatsApp and I'd guess that very few have ever heard of Telegram here.
I actually use whatever communications method the people in my life want to use.
My Mom is 71 and wants to talk on the phone. My brother is 42 and does a mix of SMS / MMS texting, phone calls, and the occasional Facebook Messenger. My cousin likes to video call with Facebook Messenger. My nieces and nephews like to use Discord / Instagram / Snapchat, so I use those.
It's weird - and more than a little stupid - how people get so hung up on a singular monolithic communication method.
FWIW, as a working Gen Z, I absolutely disagree with anyone trying to say that iMessage isn't popular. Sure it isn't the majority of conversations, but it does seem to be the preferred group chat app still.
Signed, a Gen X-er who won't use SMS except with his Boomer parents, and prefers gChat or Discord.
Signed, a zoomer.