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Comment by CatMustard | Hacker News Reader

Funny, every time I've joined a new group for dancing or art classes or DnD or anything it's always 100% of the time a WhatsApp group, no questions asked. (This is in Ireland).

Never occurred to me that Americans wouldn't have a common group chat app everyone uses. Do Americans not all use iMessage, since pretty much everybody has an iPhone there?

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>Do Americans not all use iMessage, since pretty much everybody has an iPhone there?

I'm Irish and travel back and forth a lot. First, not everyone has iPhones, Android has 40% of the market.

Older generations use Facebook to manage their clubs. I'm increasingly seeing Whatsapp and occasionally Signal for younger and more tech-savvy social circles. Facebook is non-existent in sub 35 year olds. Its just taking longer to switch over (or away from) Facebook given how tech savvy older folks are here compared to Ireland.

at least in the US, most people are fine with iMessage/SMS since

* pretty early on the vast majority of phone plans started bundling unlimited text messaging, which IIRC was a big motivator for using messaging apps abroad

* because of the vast scale of the country, domestic coverage results in no roaming for the places Americans spend most of their time, unlike in Europe where there are multitudes of countries you'd be passing in a one to two hour flight. Roaming charges in the EU were only abolished in 2022, late enough that everybody has settled on apps as the best way to manage that now.

* many American plans extend unlimited messaging to Canada and Mexico, the two likeliest places that Americans would go to abroad

Around 58% of American smartphone users are iPhone. It's a lot, but not enough to be universal. In my family there's 5 iPhone users and 4 Android users, amusingly similar to the national ratio.

Apple has famously made its strategy to use iMessage to enforce exclusivity. If you want to reach everyone, it's not iMessage. And Whatsapp in the US is worse, closer to 1/3.

What people miss about the US phone market is that while it's almost 60% iPhones, the vast majority of the top half of the income spectrum use them. I'm not sure if it's the same as it was a decade ago, but being excluded from iMessage group chats was a real exclusionary move for many teenagers.

That's a weird perspective. Certainly not everyone has an iPhone. As for other messaging apps, I also see widespread use of GroupMe for certain domains like sports teams. Some clubs also run their own Slack channels.

Americans primarily use iMessage/SMS/RCS. You only need one messaging app and everyone has it pre-installed on both iOS and Android.

WhatsApp does not solve any problems for the typical American user. Most Americans don't install WhatsApp unless they spend a lot of time overseas some place where it is required to do anything. Even international group chats seem to be more Discord-based in recent years.

SMS/RCS doesn't work for any group larger than a few people. You always end up with multiple parallel streams going that each include different subsets of the group, and sometimes other random people outside the group.

This is empirically false. I am on many groups that have (at least) several dozen people over SMS/RCS/iMessage. It isn’t ideal but it definitely works adequately.

I use Signal with some groups but that is a minority. I use WhatsApp daily but only people overseas use it. Many Americans have no idea what WhatsApp is.

The practical reality is that iMessage is a legitimately superior experience to other messaging apps, and the penetration is high enough in the US that many group chats never fall back to RCS or SMS. You can’t control that but as an observation that is commonly the case. Even when it does fallback to SMS/RCS, it mostly works for many use cases.

I’ve used every messaging app under the sun, having spent a lot of time overseas. But I totally understand why Americans don’t bother with WhatsApp (or Signal) even though I do. The value-add is non-existent in the US since almost no one else uses it and the alternatives just work.

This hasn't been the case for years.

What I like about WhatsApp is that I don't need a Google account to use it on the computer. I don't use Google messages or even a Google account on my android phone. So I have no RCS and I don't even look at SMS.

I'm probably the wrong person to answer since I don't and never have used any social media, but it seems like groups here mostly use Instagram.

Or just iMessage with fallback to SMS for those not on iPhones. Unlike most of the rest of the world, iPhones dominate in the USA.

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