> - Yes, I know no one outside the US uses iMessage.
Yes, people in the EU use WhatsApp, by Meta & Zuckerberg, and from what I've seen, often act as if that is some sort of mark of superiority.
Yes, people in the EU use WhatsApp, by Meta & Zuckerberg, and from what I've seen, often act as if that is some sort of mark of superiority.
Feels like you weren't able to have a proper discussion with those people. In many EU countries, using SMS made/makes no sense because SMS was/is super expensive as compared to WhatsApp. And using iMessage makes no sense because most people don't have an iPhone. From their point of view, it actually makes no sense.
Now if you tell them "well, where I come from everybody has an iPhone" or "SMS have always been free", probably they won't say "still, I'm better than you for no apparent reason".
I don't think that it is actually seen as a mark of superiority anywhere in the EU to use WhatsApp. Unlike apparently in some places it is seen as a mark of superiority to have an iPhone vs an Android phone.
If you go in a EU country where SMS were not prohibitively expensive in the beginning of WhatsApp (e.g. France), you'll see that WhatsApp has been less successful (at least in the beginning). WhatsApp was a killer app because it was free SMS, really.
Since when can WhatsApp interact with SMS users? They're so evil and predatory that they have entirely walled themselves off from that method of communication entirely.
They had a yearly subscription fee, but most people never got the request to pay it.
Nobody cared that it was incompatible with SMS, because everybody hated SMS because of the insane prices. In 2009 I got an iPhone 3G with an unlimited data plan, but I was still paying something like 0.20 or 0.25 Euro per SMS.
Well, you could argue that it's morally superior to be reachable by everyone, regardless of what brand of phone they use.
The ability to install a 3rd party messaging app also shows some technical skill.