Ask Lemmy

When cellphones blew up, North America (especially USA) was the outlier in that people preferred to call instead of text, even with SMS. SMS and Calltime eventually became cheaper and free as the inafara quickly grew.

However, most other countries, especially 3rd world countries, were not bleeding edge on cellular networks. Many were often considered even a decade behind on the underlying tech. Because of this, calls were more expensive than SMS (cost and available calltime), so people preferred to use SMS as much as possible over a call.

When internet based messengers became popular on smart devices, many people adopted because of the ease of use, chat features, ability to use it over wifi, and still relatively cheap data usage. They were already used to using SMS so much, a chat app was the natural upgrade they wanted.

NA people never treated SMS like the de facto messaging service, even though it was still heavily used, so they weren't actively searching for an upgrade. Most people didn't even know imessage did anything special besides work over wifi when it became a thing. Android users were content with RCS which to many was treated the same as imessage (being a backend update).