TL;DR: Apple dominates the US smartphone market, but EU regulations may offer Android a chance for resurgence by enforcing messaging interoperability and standardizing hardware features.
Look at the iMessage saga; Apple insists on treating Android owners like second-class citizens in group texts. Android owners can’t enjoy many modern messaging features with iPhone owners, such as high-quality media sharing, read receipts, and more.
Are WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Signal, and such blocked in the US? What’s with that whining about iMessage?
Are WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Signal, and such blocked in the US?
Of course they’re not blocked.
People just default to the app that comes pre-installed with their phone and sits right there on the first screen, because it’s marginally easier than picking a third party app in the App Store, installing it, and creating an account.
It’s the exact same argument that Microsoft made when they bundled Internet Explorer with their OS.
People just default to the app that comes pre-installed with their phone
Cannot confirm this is the case with messaging apps in the EU. Nobody uses iMessage and nobody uses whatever the current Google thing is each year. WhatsApp is dominat despite not being preinstalled on any major phone brand (certainly not Samsung and Apple).
Apples to oranges.
The reason is that messaging services like WhatsApp became popular in Europe because carriers charged exorbitant fees for SMS messaging at a time when no single phone manufacturer absolutely dominated the market. Apps like WhatsApp made it possible to communicate with people, no matter which specific phone or brand or platform they were using.
If the iPhone (with iMessage pre-installed) had been the dominant smartphone and ecosystem at the time, chances are that what’s happening in the US would have happened in Europe in exactly the same way.
It’s exactly the same argument as with Windows and Internet Explorer: if Windows had been one podunk operating system out of many, nobody would have cared. The whole issue was that Microsoft used the market dominance of Windows to quasi-lock users into Internet Explorer.
It’s like how the US got so far ahead with reliable universal twisted-pair phone lines, it took a lot longer here for people to really start having just a mobile phone compared to countries that were able to side-step their inadequate landline infrastructure with mobile phone services. WhatsApp largely gained prominence in countries that had much more cost effective data plans than SMS texting, making WhatsApp cheaper than SMS along with being available at all on Android (vs iMessage). In the US we had unlimited SMS messages included in plans before anything approaching that for data. So in the US SMS was already quite well entrenched in social circles by the time iMessage came out. And Apple knew that people wouldn’t be so loyal to iMessage if they couldn’t message with whatever non-trivial percentage of the social circle didn’t have an iPhone so it inlucded SMS-fallback. There’s plenty of WhatsApp and Signal users in the US at this point. But nobody cares enough to try and get everyone to switch to one platform that is available everywhere and doesn’t have SMS fallback, so SMS is still the glue that holds all the messaging together in the US.
edit: I think I can safely say it’s going to take the big 3 carriers in the US all agreeing to drop SMS (which pretty much will probably take the GSM standards body dropping SMS) for the US to truly move off of it.
100% of iPhone users have iMessage. And they can use the same app to talk to 100% of their contacts.
Fragmentation is a huge problem for everything else. What percentage of Android users have any particular one of those apps you listed?
I only grudgingly install WhatsApp when I travel to Europe. Discordv and Slack are not really competitors in this space (though I’m sure there’s a small subset of users who use them that way). I have Signal and Telegram and yet I still use SMS with most of my contacts because that’s the only one that is guaranteed to work.
I’ve tried getting my friends onto Signal, with some amount of success. But many have eventually stopped using it because I was the only one they used it with. A couple of my iPhone-using family members reported that they stopped getting notifications from Signal because they used it so infrequently that iOS basically disabled it (I guess it does that after a month of disuse but I’m not sure exactly).
It’s a losing battle. We’ve fallen back to SMS.
Fragmentation is a huge problem for everything else. What percentage of Android users have any particular one of those apps you listed?
WhatApp is installed on little bit under 100% among all Android phones and iPhones in most EU countries and should the EU actually tackle messenger interoperability, iMessage is definitively not the main target. The most die-hard Apple fans I know use iMessage for a little bit when new features were introduced. Then they go back to WhatsApp like everybody else.
To be clear: I’m not an advocate of WhatApp here, I’m merely explaining that the EU does not care at all about Apple’s chat service nobody in the EU uses. Should any legislation even affect iMessage, it’ll be more coincidental, not targeted at it.
I don’t know about the rest of the world but in the UK text messages used to cost 10p for each one you send. Multimedia messages were like 40p. Really expensive. WhatsApp came about and made both of these free. The rest is history.
Ironically, SMS are generally free these days but nobody obviously uses them. My SMS app is just full of OTP codes being sent to me.
A couple of my iPhone-using family members reported that they stopped getting notifications from Signal because they used it so infrequently that iOS basically disabled it
THE BEST OS ever /s
It’s so dumb. I have the same problem. I have an iPhone and I try to get them to use Signal, but they just keep using SMS and we keep getting garbage video being sent over group text since some of the group uses Android. When I complain they start putting stuff in Google Photo Albums instead of just using a decent messenger.
