But not many people use iMessages in EU to begin with. Its more of an American thing because of history of texting and the iMessage color phenomenon.
Rest of the world is bemused by the stories of bullied US teenagers who don't have 'the right' bubble colour on their SMS-ish app. Elsewhere we've all been using whatsapp/telegram/signal etc for years and we're never going back.
I think maybe the worst decision Apple made was not trying to push out their service (with maybe a few limitations to upsell the hardware) - although I guess blackberry tried to do that and it didn't work out.
If they were first to market with an app for android and ios I feel like things might have gone very differently.
I mean, I wouldn't install any FB software on my phone. I'm not sure "we just use WhatsApp" is the flex you think it is.
But the "US teenagers bullied" is one of those BS stories that is blown out of proportion because in a country roughly the size of the EU, you can find a lot of idiots. And US news loves stories about how your children are in some kind of peril - often peer related.
They choose not to deliberately to tie people into iPhones.
Apple does do that.
They provide a toggle (defaults to off) not to fall back to SMS. Which makes sense as an option, because it would suck to send what you think is E2E encrypted and then find out it went in clear text.
Blackberry blew it by not trying to do that till blackberry was dead. then once the whole world had migrated to a different solution they brought out their messenger. Whatsapp at best was a clone of blackberry messenger.
The time to open up your standard is at the top, not after everyone is / has abandoned you for the "next thing".
Admittedly, I couldn't even tell you what I pay--if anything--in non-iMessage texts these days on a bog-standard AT&T plan but it's not something enough to take note of and I don't take the color into any account when texting.
I do remember international texting costs driving adoption of WhatsApp though. It was a killer app that everyone knew how to instantly use, not have spam, and the contacts/pics/video/group sharing just worked across all phone OSs.
Edit: In fact, the exact opposite is what I think happened. Texting was unlimited in the US, or effectively unlimited because it was so cheap, that people in the US did not bother to look into a non default SMS/MMS apps to message others, since Americans are mostly contacting other Americans.
All the people I knew who had international contacts jumped on WhatsApp, but a huge portion of Americans never contact anyone outside America, so they never cared about international messaging costs, and never bothered with WhatsApp/Viber/Tango/Skype/whatever other chat app was out there to bypass text costs.
This gave Apple an advantage because they can implement their own iMessage in the default SMS/MMS app, and ramp people up onto iMessage without people even choosing it.
I communicate with Europeans in particular all the time. But those are via Gmail/Gchat or Twitter mostly.
No I don’t think this is accurate. I remember US cell providers charging for text message when iMessage was released. iMessage mattered to me initially, and I did use iMessage WiFi texting to avoid SMS charges and overages. Here’s an article from 2013 (two years after iMessage started) talking about telcos deciding to stop charging. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2486212/at-t--t-mobile... Don’t forget that at the time there was a big distinction between SMS and MMS (anything longer than 160 chars, anything with images, movies or audio, etc.
I have no doubt that WhatsApp, in addition to iMessage, contributed to the telcos realizing that charging for messaging was no longer a good idea. But messaging was not effectively unlimited before iMessage came around.
This link from Jul 2012 says ATT/Verizon were offering unlimited talk and text at that time:
https://www.wired.com/2012/07/att-shared-data-plan/
This link from Dec 2015 claims 90% of people had unlimited plans and they started being offered a few years ago:
>But in the last few years, “Unlimited Talk and Text” has become an increasingly common phrase.
https://instantcensus.com/blog/almost-90-of-americans-have-u...
I mean, WiFi texting was a selling point of iMessage for a reason. They made a big deal out of being able to send messages for free. From my perspective in the US, I wasn’t even aware of WhatsApp at the time, and so it felt like iMessage was the primary force causing telcos to back off. (That and the fact that charging for SMS was stupid because the cheaper alternatives used more bandwidth.) WhatsApp might have in reality been a larger force, but I’m skeptical because WhatsApp was an app you had to go get, while iMessage was the built-in default way to send text messages. IPhone user base in 2011 was more than 2x larger than WhatsApp user base at the same time.