In Europe people have to pay to send SMS right? So people have a good reason to seek out alternatives like WhatsApp, which are cross-platform. There is no habit of using SMS. Therefore linking iMessage to SMS by default doesn’t create any network effect in EU like it does in US, where SMS is free.
The reason why WhatsApp is dominant here is that iOS never gained the market share it had in the US. The iPhone was exclusive to the US until the iPhone 3G was released and as far as I remember even the 3G wasn't released globally. Also wages are lower in most of Europe and in some European countries an iPhone cost an average monthly salary.
This lead to a much higher market share for Android and the need for a cross platform messenger. While SMS were cheap or included in your monthly plan MMS was not and was really expensive. Except if you communicated with someone in another country. This meant paying expensive roaming fees (these are basically history thanks to the EU).
Meanwhile WhatsApp was "free" and a way better user experience for group chats and sharing media than SMS and MMS. It was also a way around roaming fees because you could use it with your included roaming data or over the hotel wifi. So it was basically universally adopted in the 2010s. Sending a WhatsApp is basically a verb today.
This is of course all anecdotal and is mostly a western European perspective.
I’m curious of the history. Presumably people used SMS when it was the only option, and stopped at some point and installed message apps (but they never stopped in the US).
Pure guess, but given the high market share of iPhones in the US in that demographic, it may actually be the higher usage of iMessage among young adults that prevented the ascendancy of WhatsApp there.
I think this is all stupid. One the one hand the tech companies get slammed for not inter-operating, then Apple gets slammed for inter-operating. Loads of phones have come with vendor specific messaging apps and such, it's just that Apple committed the crime of making theirs decent and successful.
Interoperating? Is the iMessage spec public? Can I use iMessage on an android phone without hacky workarounds like using a mac computer?
Come to think of it, the same lack of interop openness applies to airdrop, use of the on-phone NFC chipset (for uses other than apple-pay), and a bunch of other such things.
RCS has been available for over 10 years. Apple is being knocked for their half-assed version of interoperability, where the iPhone implements just enough of the standard to shame non-iPhone users when they communicate with friends and family. If you have any doubt this is intentional, see the emails and public comments from Apple executives.
