this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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Why are US users so focused on iMessage? I have seen rejected date memes because the message bubble had the wrong color. There are tons of alternatives out there. Is this a status thing?
Apple also intentionally made the green bubble contrast worse so that iPhone users would have eyestrain when conversing with non-iPhone users.
Oh yay another thing I can add to my list of "ways in which Apple's marketing is extremely predatory"
I'm just surprised people aren't fed up with how shit SMS (well, MMS, but I never want to hear about that again) is for anything other than text. It was always a fucking pain and just plain shit even if it weren't.
Really? Sent but not received, I guess? It seems like near any other method has things to show that you've sent it, that the server has received it, that the other user(s) received it, that they read it...
And images are... Well, very limited indeed. And costly, if we're talking MMS!
To me, it's definitely not the best choice - but I'm not in the states.
Read receipts are just a way to incite social strife.
You can usually turn those off. Not sure if you can turn them off for SMS, I remember text messages having those
Farthest I've seen regular text messages go is received receipts. And that depends on the provider, some of them only return up to "sent".
We don't here in the UK either, but we still use data messaging for the most part. I use WhatsApp for my Android friends, iMessage for my iPhone friends, and it's never a problem.
Oh aye, back in the day we had a text allowance. My first contract allowed me 50 SMS per day, which felt like a lot until you actually started using them. But I’ve had functionally limitless - or actually limitless - SMS for probably twenty years at this point.
I’m lucky if I send five a month, and most of those were intended to be iMessages that failed for whatever reason.
We don't have per message charge in France either but people still use WhatsApp or Signal because you can't have groups in SMS.
vast majority of people use the default app their phone choice comes with.
historically eise, the reason EU uses whatsapp was that there was a time period early on where sms costed money, so people used whatsapp to circumvent that. the U.S didnt have that problem as sms was free for the majority of people in that time period.
This seems a bit revisionist. Everyone had an amount of smses per month that were free in their contract.
People switched to whatsapp because it was better than sms.
Not everybody, and not infinitely far back. There was definitely a period where there were no free texts included (although I do think that by the iPhone introduction many did have it, but still not all!)
its good to be clear that we are talking about a time period when people migrated to whatapp, and the reasoning for migrating to whatsapp. and how the 'text for free' thing wasn't a big motivator, (nor was it a new idea)
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And also because Whatsapp was available on every platform, from the dominant ones at the time (Nokia and Blackberry) to the newcomers (iOS, Android, even Windows Phone and more obscure ones like Samsung's whatever it was called).
Samsung had bada os then worked with intel and the tizen foundation on tizen
wasn’t it the long distance thing? charged for sending SMS outside of your network or something. I recall whatsapp was the way to text your parents from one country in to another, even in the EU.
I know for a fact my fam adopted almost a decade ago, so we can text from USA to EU to SA to Canada. Family all over and it’s free.
39 cents/SMS. I remember this time. This does not explain why it has to be that specific protocol, though.
because people were already uaing sms when it was paid beforehand before smartphones were a thing. people just used to whatever the default was, especially since its not like everyone switched to a smart phone immediately after the iphone 3gs' relase. sms was the default method to talk to people who were still using "dumbphones"
Also, at the time, WhatsApp was pretty much the only option. Nowadays, there are a lot of other options.
A part of it was that they put in the effort to support featurephones. People with smartphones always had other options.
It was the other way around, the feature phones were funny at the time so not supporting them would have made no sense. And iPhones and Androids had just been launched at the time so there weren't actually lots of options for them.
WhatsApp was available for Blackberry, Symbian, and Nokia Series 40, and I've seen device support cited as an important part of its early success. It actually looks like Skype, AIM, and ICQ had pretty good support for various devices in the early 2010s too so I'm not sure that claim holds up.
Yes it's a status thing and I'm aware of people who have been rejected on dates for having an Android.
Sounds like they are better off that way. Anyone who thinks that is important is probably not worth it.
I’ll bet that most of them never happened. But they do make great memes!
The average American is not tech savvy.
(Which is surprising, given that the US has arguably the strongest software development industry in the world.)
Most Americans just use the default apps installed on their phones. Facebook Messenger is really the only non-default messaging app with mass market penetration, and that's because most Americans already have Facebook accounts.
Americans just don't want to sign up for new accounts or learn new apps. Therefore, iMessage won by default.