this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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Everyone knows, because anytime anyone talks about SMS/MMS/RCS somebody comes in to remind people that it's mostly a US thing. SMS/MMS started to become cheap in the early 00s in most of the US (and unlimited free for users of the same carrier was common) and as carriers raced to compete by the late 00s, unlimited SMS/MMS was commonly free in the US, even to users outside their own carrier. All carriers had interoperability with SMS/MMS already. Even iMessage falls back to SMS/MMS outside of iMessage. It is pretty logical that SMS/MMS became what most people used in the US.
Elsewhere, Whatsapp came out when much of the rest of the world was still paying for the number of text messages sent or they could use a miniscule amount of their data and use something else.
We know. It always comes up.
I'm not surprised, that is a very strange arrangement and the conversation sounds nuts from the outside looking in.
Maybe start caveating it with "for those of us in North America" or something. From over here it really sounds like you guys are mashing random keys on your keyboard.
For the record, while SMS still being paid above a certain number was a factor, we were already vastly defaulting to messaging apps before Whatsapp took over. It wasn't rare to give people your MSN Messenger info rather than your phone number even during the feature phone era. Texting was always more of a commercial thing and for finding people in the street rather than a thing to have long chats.
And the reason why people were defaulting to MSN Messenger was... Because SMS weren't free. The same thing was happening in the USA/Canada at that point in time, nothing exceptional about Europe. Free SMS reversed that trend in one place, the change to phone plans didn't happen quickly enough in the other place and a third party app won, that's all.
What's nice about SMS is that it will always work as soon as there's a signal and no matter what phone people have, no need to install multiple third party apps to cater to the needs of those who decide to go against the flow and use something else, you boot your phone for the first time and it's ready to send messages no matter the phone, simple as that.
Whatsapp is preinstalled on every phone you buy here (including iPhones, AFAIK, but maybe that's a sync thing? I don't know, I haven't seen an iPhone in ages). So it's pretty comparable these days.
For what it's worth, the timeline shift isn't just due to the SMS pricing changes. I think the general introduction of mobile telephony was also pretty staggered. I remember US-based media depicting the idea of a teen having long SMS conversations before I or anybody I knew had a feature phone. MSN dominance wasn't caused by expensive text messaging, it predates text messaging altogether, at least for mainstream users.
SMS is definitely a solid fallback for emergency services, though. It definitely retains use, even if it's mostly notifications from governments and companies.
I meant MSN still being dominant even after cellphones offered the capacity to chat via text. WhatsApp was introduced in 2009, the first iPhone was introduced to the market two years prior, that's a whole lot of time where text communication on cellphones was done via SMS.
Sure, and mainstream texting predates the iPhone by several years. And the iPhone wasn't an instant hit over here, either. Too expensive, both the hardware and the data plans. Hell, I already had a full time job by then and even being a techhead I waited several generations and only got an iPod Touch because getting the GSM version seemed like a waste of a LOT of money just to get access to the App Store.
But still, MSN's dominance predates texting and it just kept that role while texting was a separate way to catch up with people on the go. And yeah, it was expensive, or at least paid piecemeal, so people went as far as using their phones as beepers, giving each other little deliberately missed calls to point them towards other messaging apps or social media. Because social media also happened, and it also predates smartphones, and it kinda took over for MSN Messenger. By the time Android phones got big over here, let alone data plans or SMS became the norm, those became the default.
So yeah, the economics of it all drove the adoption, along with companies being more regional (no ICQ or AOL over here, either), but it's more of a series of mismatches in the timeline, rather than a direct line from SMS pricing to Whatsapp. There are multiple different tangents along the way, and they're different in different places.