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.
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.
That’s only valid if you’re comparing the US with 3rd World nations.
When mobile phones took of, even poor peripheral southern european nations (like mine) already had good fixed line telephone infrastructures and certainly the few people who didn’t have a phone line yet weren’t the kind that could afford early mobile phones.
In reality the fast growth in mobile phone adoption in the EU vs US is a case study in how top down enforced standardization can help markets: whilst the US had multiple network standards which required diferent phones and were incompatible with each other, in Europe governments were forcing mobile carriers (by making it a condition to get a radio spectrum license to operate as one) to use GSM, so all phones were compatible and pretty much from day 1 you could, for example, use your phone in a different country even though it was linked to a diferent carrier in your home-country.
Because of this, even though the mobile phone infrastructure started behind that of the US, it and mobile phone adoption grew much faster than in the fragmented US market and this was what allowed Nokia from Finland to, for a while, be the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the World (most of which they lost when smartphones became a thing).
Eventually the US itself ended up doing the same thing, if I remember it correctly by around the late 90s with v3 of GSM.
Those are valid observations, but the different technologies all terminated to the POTS network, so phone calls across networks always worked. But it was just considerably more expensive to make phone calls on mobile than land lines where you could get flat-rate unlimited calling (local, not long distance, getting a cell phone then could potentially be cheaper for long distance). It was the early 00s when flat-rate unlimited plans were becoming common in the US, and that’s when people started ditching their land lines.
AT&T was notable for being the first one (of the Big 3) here using internationally compatible GSM in the 90s. But it actually wasn’t until LTE that Verizon stopped using CDMA for data (but they still used it for voice) in 2010 when we finally started seeing things trend towards adopting a common standard in the Big 3 national carriers. Sprint went with Wi-MAX instead of LTE for data at that time, and having to retool to LTE was one of the financial straws that broke their back.
It was exactly the same in Europe in terms of fixed line vs mobile call prices and ultimate connectivity.
The difference is that any mobile phone (the actual device) that worked for any one carrier in Europe would work for any other carrier in Europe, and although that carriers did try to lock-in customers with contracts and even carrier subsidized network locked phones, it was still possible to change carriers (especially after supporting number portability was made mandatory) plus roaming just seamlessly worked when moving all around Europe (turning the potential problem of market fragmentation in Europe into a strength as rather than a handful of continent-wide carriers with spotty coverage in some places, in Europe local carriers focused on local coverage and access when outside your carrier’s are was provided via some other carrier via roaming).
I remember the talk on the Internet at the time (I’ve had a mobile phone since the 90s) and how americans constantly complained of the need of different phones for different carriers and the uneveness of countrywide coverage, unlike in Europe were if you bought your own “mobile phone” it would just work with whatever carrier you chose.
(Mind you, carriers tried to lock-in customers with locked phones, which funilly enough resulted in the mushrooming of little stores which would unlock your phone, all perfectly legal).
And yeah, LTE was part of GSM v3, hence why I mentioned it as the point when the US finally standardized its mobile network.
