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That’s easy: unlimited SMS was common on most mobile plans in the US as early as the mid-2000s. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans had no financial incentive to use WhatsApp.
We had unlimited SMS by the time smartphones rolled around in the UK, we still decided not having some weird caste system based on what messaging app you use was the obvious choice.
In fact I remember my American mates were charged for receiving texts, which I never heard of from any other Europeans, so I'd say there was probably a stronger incentive your side of the pond
In the US you either had unlimited SMS or no SMS plan at all, in which case you got charged for every single message, sent or received. But I remember having unlimited SMS as early as 2003.
If you had no SMS at all then you certainly didn't have a data plan, which ruled out WhatsApp entirely.
It’s not a weird caste system. It’s just that people have always primarily just used SMS in the US, and if the people texting all happen to have iPhones, then there are some extra features tacked on (from the perception of the end user). Having been in many many large group chats for various activities and events, where it’s never 100% apple and just SMS, absolutely nobody cares at all. It’s just that maybe some teens and tweens use the colors to judge and exclude, which they famously find justifications for doing in every generation, and probably even that is overblown by the media.
There simply was never an incentive to kind of force everybody to move over to e.g. WhatsApp, and people don’t bother to do something like that en masse without a need to.