In Europe, it’s very normal to use multiple chat apps (WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Threema, etc).
iMessage isn’t even that good a chat app! It’s really hard to understand this clearly social issue affecting North America from a non-NA perspective.
Those kinds of apps took off in other places because SMS was expensive, but in the US there has been cheap and/or unlimited SMS for a couple of decades now. So people had no reason to use anything else. That means when iMessage came along and transparently covered up SMS it became the standard.
It is especially bad for teenagers where the iPhone has almost 90% market share. If you are a teen using Android with 9 friends, chances are literally all of them are on iMessage. Good luck trying to convince all 9 of them to install another app just for you. Apple’s indoctrination marketing is so powerful that kids are actually bullied for not having an iPhone.
Also your 9 friends might just exclude you from group texts, and therefor activities, because they don’t want to see the green bubbles. I shit you not.
They didn’t take off just because SMS was expensive, but because they offer a much better experience with many more features
Sure, but pricing was the main driver. There doesn’t seem to be readily available historical pricing data but even as late as 2018 the price of SMS in Europe seemed to be €0.07-0.11 per message. Which means it was even more expensive back in the early 2010s when WhatsApp and others were beginning to take off. For the US the price per message is and has been $0. I think the extra features were ultimately just a bonus when compared to being able to send messages for free. The fact the US still hasn’t switched is proof enough that it being a better experience is not enough to compel people to change off of the default. Money is a huge motivator.
