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Comment by NewJazz | Hacker News Reader

Tim Cook was pretty clear on his position here. "Buy your mom an iPhone". Going half in on apple products was the second mistake. Buying apple at all was the first. These devices aren't for you, the networks aren't for you. Stop acting surprised when you get burned by the trillion dollar corporation that holds exclusive access to the keys of the most ubiquitous mobile devices in the US.

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The rest of the world messages this just fine by using WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal or whatnot

The blue bubble is the essencial first world problem

It’s more of a (north) American thing. iPhone adoption isn’t really high enough for iMessage to catch on outside, though I guess some countries use sms instead of WhatsApp.

It's not iPhone adoption: lots of countries have very high iPhone adoption, but don't use iMessage. The key is SMS: no one outside North America uses it any more; it's just like fax machines. It might still be used by businesses to send you package delivery notices, for instance, but that's about it. No one uses it to talk to their friends and family. Here in Japan, iPhone adoption is at least as high as in the US, but absolutely no one uses SMS for chatting; they use LINE messenger instead.

From what I've read elsewhere, the main reason was SMS charges: many years ago, it cost money to send SMS texts in most countries, while in North America the telecom companies were faster at offering free texting (or at least flat-rate). So elsewhere, various chat apps arose and caught on: LINE in Japan, WeChat in China, KakaoTalk in Korea, WhatsApp elsewhere. Now that everyone is used to these services and they've become so popular to the point where they're basically mandatory to participate in society, why would anyone want to go back to SMS? The only problem with the messaging apps is that they're all separate from each other so they're silos, but unless you have a lot of friends spread across different countries, that's not an issue. And these apps don't disciminate based on which phone you own.

I don't think that's necessarily the right way to look at iMessage adoption, for some countries is was more about the cost and prevalence of SMS. In the US SMS was pushed rather heavily, but not that cheap, in other countries SMS was pretty expensive, and not really pushed that hard, so there was ample space for e.g. WhatsApp. Then there are countries like Denmark, where SMS was already either literally free or as good as free, before the iPhone and iMessage was ever a thing. In that case people already used SMS heavily and had no financial incentive to switch to anything else, so when iMessage rolls in people just adopt it because it's the default SMS app.

More than anything I believe it's more related to social circles than specific countries. I use Signal, but in frequent, because that's what colleague around the world use, and I have two friend on Signal, but that's it. It's not something I consider standard. I know people who use WhatsApp pretty extensively, but again only within a limited social circle. A lot of people use Facebook Messenger, but I've never seen anyone expect that I have it installed. SMS is still the default, and sometimes it just happens to be delivered via iMessage.

I think by the time whatsapp rolled around it was no longer normal for US customers to pay by the individual message.

Messaging software is fully determined by who you want to send messages to. It tends to unify across groups that interact, so knowing someone's nationality will tell you their messaging software with high confidence:

China: wechat

Taiwan, Japan: line

India, Australia: whatsapp

Russia: telegram

USA: facebook messenger

and so on.

Interesting that you include Facebook Messenger, because many seems to forget that when they talk about messaging platforms.

Especially when Americans talk about Europe "not using iMessage" it is frequently assumed that we're on WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Viper or something like that, the sad truth is that Facebook Messenger is probably the biggest platform in many countries and in top three in the rest. That just not the platform that those most critical of iMessage wants to be on either.

As an anecdote of one, no one in the US has ever asked me if I had Facebook Messenger. I have never installed it anywhere. Many other apps but never that one.

My chat network is pretty global and iMessage, Signal, and WhatsApp seem to cover all bases in practice.

Another thing that helped imessage cement its position was that teens often had an ipod and you could use imessage on an ipod, so those teens talking to their friends were using imessage and when they switched to iphone that mental model carried over. Blue bubbles were familiar and green bubbles were alien.

Problem: a proprietary service

Solution: another proprietary service

No you got it wrong. The problem is a proprietary service that can only be used on one brand of phones. The solution is a service, proprietary or not, that is equally available for all devices.

The problem is a "free", proprietary service which is not explicitly opt-ed in.

This is just Internet Explorer again, disguised.

Go tell the mobile standards orgs to make a better standard. RCS got halfway there, and then just gave up, and everything on Android uses... proprietary extensions.

Are you available to provide tech support to help my grandma install WhatsApp?

IMO Apple did the right thing. IMessage is so much nicer than SMS. Anything is nicer than SMS. SMS is the junk protocol carriers used to double dip on GSM packets.

I'm just sad Apple didn't push for iMessage to become THE messaging standard. Google is still trying with RCS. Hopefully it takes off.

No they didn't. The fact this confusion can occur is proof along with all the issues people have had after switching OSs.

A proprietary messaging service is fine, it was what people liked about Blackberrys back in the day. The silent upgrading is the problem.

Oh, that's a good point! I do hate how they merged iMessage alongside SMS in the same client. It's hecka confusing for everyone.

In my opinion RCS isn't really comparable to iMessage; it still needs support from the network provider and needs the cell phone data network to function. We really need some kind of standards based internet messaging solution in order to fill the space of iMessage on Android devices... Perhaps something like Google Chat or Allo or Hangouts, LOL!

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