this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Who the hell uses iMessage? Do some people really only have friends with apple phones?
iPhones have the largest share of the US smartphone market. iMessage is the default messaging app on every iPhone, and cannot be changed. Ergo, iMessage is one of the top 5 largest messaging apps in the US. I believe it's number 3 or 4 behind FB Messenger, WhatsApp, and FaceTime (also an Apple product).
Anyone who doesn’t want to touch a Facebook product with a thousand foot pole.
And then there's me, who doesn't want to touch a Facebook, Apple, or Google product with a thousand foot-pole.
You don't have a smartphone?
I use Android and disable as much google stuff as possible.
So it’s google then.
so you're touching a google product...
Yes.
As appealing as going completely off-grid is in an idealistic kind of way, I still have to function in modern sOcIeTy, which requires me to make some compromises. If you know of any quality phones that aren't controlled by any big tech companies, let me know.
I've heard of the Fairphone, unfortunately it's not sold in the US.
Order one from Canada? Not sure. And of the big tech companies that control phones, Apple is by far the best (at privacy at least, repairability is on the other end of the scale), I wouldn’t touch anything made by Google or Samsung with a ten foot pole. Maybe an old windows phone? Nokia?
On that note though, I have a friend who literally doesn’t own a smart phone. He has a flip phone (a new one too, no clue where he bought it) and he seems to get along in society just fine. Idk. Definitely not for everyone.
Yo.
This is largely a North American problem. More than 50% of phones are iPhone, and the de facto texting for iPhone users is iMessage. While WhatsApp is the default IM for most of the rest of the world, it's iMessage in North America.
I'm so annoyed by people dismissing a standard protocol for sending messages builtin to phones and the networks they run on as unnecessary. We should have choice, but why in the fuck should we not have the most basic fucking infrastructure already in place that works with every device and without needing a new account/ app and needing to wrangle people we know into using the that app? I truly don't get why people seem against a fucking standard just because they found a workaround for not having one
So much incredible UX design work has been undertaken by the experts in charge of it… then we’re forced to reassess solutions (Signal or Telegram?), remarket them (everybody download this app!), support them (no grandma when you don’t have your glasses Siri can’t send Signal messages).
Great job with your stock Apple and for driving the blind to tears with such excellent accessibility features and epic hardware… but you suck for stigmatizing kids’ digital lives and causing so much duplicative effort and confusion in the messaging space.
iMessage is VERY popular in the Us.
Yes, apprently. I didn't know that. I think less then 10% of the people I know have iPhones. It's all Android.
Different countries have wildly different phone and messaging systems preferences.
And wildly different economic realities. The difference between three months and five days of salary to buy an iPhone 15 (roughly comparing India & USA).
Lots of rich countries have Android dominant mobile markets. Europe is full of them. Example, Germany.
Over 50% in the US. And under 30 it's something insane like 75%
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Yes. Most of my family / peers have iPhones. So iMessage is the standard for them. We use signal for the rest.
In the US, iMessage is really popular.
I'd assume some people use it when it's available and just use regular texts or something like Signal for non apple contacts.
I'd be really surprised if anyone only uses it and just never talks to anyone with an android...
Like RCS, iMessage falls back to SMS / MMS (aka “green bubbles”) if iMessage isn’t available.
People still talk cross-platform, but people dislike the drop in media quality / functionality when they get kicked to the old protocol.
Yawn.