Apple's weird and semi-transparent (to the user) hybrid system of mixing a proprietary web protocol and SMS in the same app is obviously problematic, and the rest of the world moved on to other messaging services, but it's weird that the US is still stuck on this.
Not sure how accurate is the data but this seems interesting:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1263720/mobile-messaging...
To call between France and various African countries in the early Android era, I remember first using Viber - but after a while everyone switched to Whatsapp in a few months: somehow, through some sheer black magic, Whatsapp had nailed voice quality over the lossy high-latency links that were the norms then, and users noticed.
Care to quantify that? PAYG SMS was/is consistently way more expensive than PAYG data[1] in every country I have visited; granted I haven't been to many countries, but I've visited most continents. IIRC, there's a 2-3 orders of magnitude difference in the costs-per-140-bytes sent.
Per WhatsApp message, which ends up being a few KiB per day for text only
Can't say people, to this day, have much of a culture of using whatsapp video calls. Skype was the majority in the Whatsapp takeover time and today it's a mix of Zoom and Skype. International calls also weren't that common.
So sounds like there may have been different motivations in your country than mine.
But I could jump onto coffee shop WiFi to negate that.
That theory would seem disproved by Mexico which is also pretty rural, but I believe their cell infrastructure sprung up pretty quickly and later than the US so "old school" sms didn't get the same traction.
iMessage is not the only one at fault here, Google Messages (or how they call it today) is not better. It's the first thing I disable when switching to a new phone.
You can migrate between iOS and Android, but I think Android > iOS is a very recent feature.
iOS backs up to either iTunes as part of a phone backup, or separately to iCloud within its own app container; and Android backs up to Google Drive. I'm very surprised that WhatsApp on iOS doesn't support Google Drive either, given that it's the more "open" of the two.
Of course they do not offer to split these up into two apps, which may be what you want.
It's not odd at all.
Lots of iPhones in the US because of high incomes, and high iPhone availability. Lots of non-iPhones in the rest of the world because of comparatively low incomes, and significantly less iPhone availability.
I see no mystery.
The US is not the only country with a wealthy populace which tends to use mostly iPhones. The UK, Germany, Switzerland, the Baltics, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan are all roughly equally as wealthy (if not more so) per capita. However, in literally everywhere else but the US, people almost exclusively use third-party apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat, etc. iMessage is completely ignored, and the Messages app on iPhones is used solely for SMSes from carriers, 2FA OTPs, and random spam that is ignored.
Furthermore, several flagship Android phones rival iPhones in cost now.
Are you thinking of GDP, perhaps? I think that household income (and individual) is highest in the US (adjusted for PPP).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
Also, Americans were using awful phones while the RoW was using much better phones like Nokias thst even in their non-communicator series made texting far easier thanks to stuff like T9.
So the rest of the world used SMS and texting far more than Americans Pre-smartphone.
When smartphones came out and WhatsApp was released, the RoW was far more willing to pay the dollars needed to buy WhatsApp (it wasn’t free before FB bought it) because they would easily save on their low but still not free SMS charges.
Whereas Americans were not as willing to pay for an app to do something they didn’t do anyways, and anyways by this time phone carriers in the US made SMS free for the most part.
As a result WhatsApp became entrenched in the RoW well before iMessage was released (2011), so non Americans continued using WhatsApp, even as Americans started using the free available iMessage instead.
Worth mentioning the unique phones sold in the Japanese market by domestic manufacturers prior to smartphones, which were some of the most advanced in existence at that point and had been for many years. People in Japan were doing things on their phones in the late 90s and early 00s that most of the rest of the world wouldn’t for another 10-15 years.
Americans definitely used Nokia phones in the 2000s btw, not to mention Asian ones like LG, Sony, etc. I never saw a cell phone in the US that didn't come with T9 word and by ~2008 full QWERTY keyboard phones were extremely popular. Texting was very easy in America in the 2000s and we did a lot of it.
The dollar was often waived. They were never serious about charging non-business users.
Due to Apple's desperate need to keep all their inventions to themselves only regardless of long term effects (lightning port say hi and bye in quick succession), its worse than useless and actually harms communication between people. I don't know a single person/haven't met a single one in Switzerland in past 13 years who is using it, everybody is on some other competition (while working in IT and bank and quite a few folks here sport mostly older apple devices).
Huh? That's exactly what iMessage does, and one of the key reasons people prefer it over SMS.
> Send read receipts
> Turn on read receipts so that people who send you messages see when you’ve read them.
> You can also send read receipts for a conversation only. The per-conversation setting overrides the global setting.
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Note that some people don't enable this. One member of my family has read receipts off and I don't see anything on that one. Another member has them on and I can see 'delivered' and 'read' show up.
Many people who are security conscious have that setting off by default because, well, security conscious.
I would contend that not having read receipts as an option is important functionality for some.
Lightening port will bring in more revenue than USB-C.
iMessage creates social pressure for people to buy iPhones to match their friends.
iMessage access to non-Apple products doesn’t increase their revenue.
Apple is not an altruistic not for profit organization.
If someone can't be assed to download a zero cost and surveillance-free, ad-free app to talk to you, how much do they really value communicating with you?
Wait I missed this, what did Signal do?
Speak for yourself. I'm not in the US and still prefer SMS, simply because you can port over your contacts and don't have to share them with shady businesses on a fscking platform, for freaking text messages, something we already did 30 years ago (not counting emails almost double as old).
They are certainly not e2ee.
Do you trust no encryption vs whatever Meta/WhatsApp claim to use?
Especially when it is from Apple, famous for it just works, and being the largest company on the planet.
Then they started to ask me daily to switch to using their messaging thing whenever possible.
That's when I went on f-droid and downloaded the first SMS app I found. I can't understand why the SMS app should send anything else than SMS.
After all, I'm aware that using any messenger made by google means constant migration.
iMessage bypassed the carrier tax, It's that simple. That's why it became popular, and that's why the network effects working against Whats App, Signal, and others are so strong. And it's why there's skepticism towards the standards that Google and carriers are pushing for, because a lot of people don't remember the carriers' business practices very fondly.
I hate being nickel and dimed, but if this is one case where if sending me a message cost a few cents, and it ends up stopping SMS spam, it might be worth it..
Back when I stated using a phone, we used to have to pay for texts...