I do not know a single person who uses iMessage. Europe uses Signal or WhatsApp. With an iPhone market share of 26 %, it just isn’t viable. People like to use a single (or at most 2) messaging app. No point in using iMessage.
Even not considering this, the EU has 448 Million people and a smartphone penetration of roughly 85 %. So if every iPhone user would use iMessage, this would bring the number to 448 * 0.85 * .26 = 99 Million. I highly doubt more than half of the iPhone users use iMessage.
Well my family uses it, I’m the only Android User in their “iMessage”-Group and I’m getting every Message as an SMS or MMS, but when I reply it doesn’t get shown in their group. It just flat out sucks. Apple should support RCS, but it won’t because they use their iMessage dominance in the US to pressure people to switch to iPhones
iPhones aren’t the only products that can use iMessage. You have apple watches and iPads on top of it. Which puts the potential uses way up.
While iPhones might have a market share below 30% in the EU as a whole, the share varies a lot in individual countries. In Poland it’s just 10% while in Denmark it’s above 60%.
And iPhones tend to appear in clusters. In my experience they aren’t evenly distributed. I know of families where everyone uses iPhones while in my family no one has. So any kind of personal experience is rather pointless.
Until numbers are publicized, I still find it hard to believe that fewer than 45 million people use iMessage a month. I fully believe that fewer than 45 million people use it daily. So it comes down to how you define active users. And Apple will almost certainly use a strict definition of what counts as an active users to reduce the number.
