* Americans, virtually no one uses iMessage outside your country, or at least to the point that it'll force you to get an iPhone. Even Japan, with their love with iPhones, uses a homegrown service for their messaging needs.
Calling LINE a win over iMessage is a huge stretch. The privacy policies on LINE were not good at all when I last looked at it several years ago; transferring your account from one phone to another was (is?) really annoying, and getting a username isn't necessarily that easy.
Say what you want, but Apple didn't punish me as much for having moved from Japan to Canada.
Nobody I know colloquially calls it that in the US either. The app is called "messages", and people just call it "texting"... "on an iPhone". I don't think most people even realize it is not SMS/MMS.
Nobody knows what SMS or MMS are either.
Often, yes.
iMessage in the US is, to put it bluntly, a self-selecting cult. The amount of articles, podcasts and dating vlogs that detail how common it is to straight up discount a member of the opposite sex from dating based on not having an iPhone is testament to this.
In an OKCupid Poll (which is about as transparent as dating bigdata ever got) 27% of respondents felt that green bubbles were less desirable than mansplaining in terms of dealbreakers in a potential partner...
https://www.androidauthority.com/green-bubble-phenomenon-102... https://www.cnet.com/culture/iphone-or-android-your-phone-ch... https://nypost.com/2019/08/14/sorry-android-users-these-ipho...
The only valid complaint is messing up iMessage group chats which are much better than SMS group chats.
- Proud Android User
WhatsApp is more common in the UK
I can confirm that iMessage is extremely common in Australia. WhatsApp is very uncommon, outside of people with European (and maybe South American?) friends or family to keep in touch with. And given the country's demographics, I suspect there are far more people using WeChat to keep up with their overseas contacts in Aus than there are people using WhatsApp.
Meanwhile Europe uses another US tech giant's service. The simple answer is that most of Europe is not wealthy enough to afford iPhones and not adept enough at developing competing services without first kneecapping competition with regulation.