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Comment by agos | Hacker News Reader

I hope that the Apple critics understand that this issue is specific to the USA and the rest of the world has no idea that it even exists

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Wait, is this whole blue bubble thing US only?

I'm not in the US but I use WhatsApp and android and thought it was some kind of iPhone SMS thing.

Is SMS in the US different from other countries?

The difference is that in most other countries people don't use SMS. They use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat.

The fragmentation isn't ideal, but it's better than the vendor locking.

Ahhhh, not "an issue" rather than not something that happens.

Thanks for clarifying.

How is a market with many participants not ideal? It seems to me the messaging "fragmentation" is just the free market actually working and people being willing and able to choose something other than the defaults and it working out.

There's stuff like Beeper that allows for consolidation of multiple services, if you don't like having to use multiple apps for different people.

> The difference is that in most other countries people don't use SMS.

The difference is that in most other countries people don't use SMS to talk to other people; receiving SMS messages from automated systems is AFAIK still very common everywhere.

It isn't, I had a very similar experience several years ago in the UK when I migrated from iPhone to Android.

Happened to me in Australia a few weeks ago. Missed an important text because I bought a Mac for the first time. A really really shitty onboarding experience.

WAT? Doesn't iMessage work the same everywhere else?

None of my family members understand that iMessage isn't just SMS.

I've never come across anyone outside the US who messaged me via iMessage. Almost exclusively used in the US. Recently Apple claimed it didn't have to apply DMA measures to iMessage in the EU because it has less than 45 Million users there, or less than 10% penetration.

In the UK it's WhatsApp, in parts of Europe I believe it's Viber, in some communities it's Telegram, in Asia it's WhatsApp or LINE, in China it's WeChat, in some places it's Facebook Messenger.

I'm between the UK and Australia, and haven't received an iMessage in years, literally. I get SMS on a daily/weekly basis for 2FA things.

It probably has something to do with the fact that outside the US, iPhone market penetration is low, so it's assumed that sending someone an SMS will be an actual SMS, not always upgraded to iMessage.

Careful now, merely suggesting that SMS might be past its prime is grounds for immediate execution amongst Apple critics.

Maybe we could solve the collective action problem, if Apple stopped making half the population think they are using SMS when they are actually using iMessage.

Yeah you're right, they should do something like change the colour of the bubbles to indicate a difference.

There are more countries in north america than the USA, and some of them have this problem too.

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