this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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(Not a trolling/joking)Why Americans so tied to Apple messages and as result waiting for RCS? We, here in Europe, just use Telegram/Facebook messenger/Instagram direct for decade and only 1.5 nerds like me knows about existence of Apple iMessage. I’ve tried iMessages with my friends and then we just back to Telegram, because we have tried to convince our friends to use iMessages and nobody wants to learn how to use it and first question from everyone is: how I will write to people with android(most people here have android)?
Using metas privacy invasion apps for messaging is cringe
There's some history here:
SMS was ubiquitous in the United States long before smartphones. We didn't have country codes to worry about, so anyone else in the United States was reachable in near real time over text, using an asynchronous, open, inter-carrier method of communication. If I had your phone number I could text you for free. Layered onto that was various automated systems over text (alerts, etc.). Later on, the carriers rolled out MMS for basic pictures being sent, group texts, etc.
So when iPhones became popular here, the default method of communication was SMS/MMS. The iPhone user knew that it would work with dumb phones, Android phones, Windows phones, whatever. And those habits and those chat threads predated the rise of WhatsApp, FB Messenger, WeChat, Telegram, etc., and a lot of those apps simply didn't work with old dumb phones. Why give up an existing group chat thread just because one of those friends didn't have a smartphone yet?
Then, whenever every member of a chat had an iPhone, the system automatically defaulted to the upgraded iMessage experience: high quality media sharing, typing/delivery/read notifications, reactions, etc. It was a slow transition, and didn't start to show clear advantage over the open SMS/MMS standard until smartphones were ubiquitous, and where most people had iPhones.
And so once everyone had a "it just works" app, they didn't want to switch to an app that required everyone to get a separate account and download a separate app. Especially because the iPhone hit something like 80% market share among certain demographics (the young, the non-technical rich, etc.).
Excellent write up. I hear people ask about this all the time, why the USA defaulted towards SMS/MMS/iMessage when other parts of the world didn’t. It is not the case of now but the history of the technological development and saturation of the technology within the younger demographics that got us here naturally. We didn’t have to make a choice of which platform to migrate our friend/family groups too because we had enough of the functions we needed built into all of our phones along the last 30 years.
It doesn’t come down to what is the best platform right now, it comes down to what was the best, and easiest, platform to get all my friends and family using when my country/region/friend group/etc got smartphones. There are large swaths of the world population where their technology exposure was landline>TV>Internet cafe>smartphone. Where the beginning of their online presence was through an Internet cafe and then very soon after (within years) they had a smart phone. In that model their first interaction with instant messaging was not phone to phone but computer to computer and they used messenger/instagram/whatsapp/wechat and etc and those social networks of friends migrated with them from the Internet cafe PC as the main point of access to a Smartphone as the main point of access.
I primarily use Signal because I like my chats end-to-end encrypted. iMessage is not that bad on that front.
I avoid any Facebook-written code like the plague, including WhatsApp and Messenger. They literally have a track record of putting malware in their products. I don’t understand why Europeans aren’t bothered by this.
Apple is less evil than Facebook/Meta/etc so it’s an easy choice not to use them.
Open communication standards are always superior to proprietary lock-in that relies on the good graces of a corporation that doesn’t care about you.