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Comment by marcan_42 | Hacker News Reader

I'm a millennial and we don't use texts in most of the world either. Sticking to SMS and SMS-adjacent stuff like iMessage seems to be a fairly uniquely American thing. The last time I had an SMS conversation was... May 2020. And before that it was October 2019. Everything else is verification/notification SMSes.

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.

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US millennials I am in contact with run their lives through SMS, or “whatever happens when I tell my phone to send a text message to someone in my contacts”.

Source: Am US millennial in a dozen text groups.

I think GP is saying “us millenials”, not “US millenials”. (I was confused for a moment myself)

Indeed. Edited for clarity.

It's probably whatever was popular when you started using technology to stay in touch with your friend group.

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.

> I’m a older than millennial, but too young to be a boomer

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.

> It's probably whatever was popular when you started using technology to stay in touch with your friend group.

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.)

I think the reason that SMS/iMessage has hung on in the US is that they got "unlimited texting" plans early on, whereas in Europe carriers kept charging per-message much longer, driving people to messaging apps simply to save money. Europeans are also more likely to have international friends to send messages to, which costs even more (you see the same thing in diaspora in the US). Before WhatsApp, I remember Skype was very popular as a messenger since people already used it for free international calls.

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.

Deltachat can do that.

> In Europe you'll find people using WhatsApp or Telegram

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.

Do Americans even really "stick" to SMS? I know millennials who might use iMessage as their primary channel, but the only people I know who ONLY text are my mom and grandma. Everyone I know around my age (millennial) has a small collection of apps that they used a lot for a bit, and now maybe have one or two people they still talk to on.

Personal anecdata of one:

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.

iMessage is the best SMS application. Nothing compares. If you haven an iPhone, the native integrations with everything is incomparable to anything like Messenger, etc.

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