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Comment by sgt | Hacker News Reader

iMessage is ABSOLUTELY brilliant if your family and friends are all on iPhones, which I'm pretty sure is fairly common in most Western countries.

Regardless whether you agree with that, it is super practical for me and my family. It also means we don't have run other chat software like WhatsApp.

The whole experience is just so seamless and well integrated across your devices. Everything from regular messages, voicenotes, sending cute animojis to your wife, or doing a FaceTime with my 102 year old grandmother. I do that on a daily basis. And I can easily continue a conversation from my computer, or even respond from my Apple Watch when exercising.

I am still on WhatsApp though as there are millions of users worldwide, but I keep notifications off and check it only once a day.

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> brilliant if your family and friends are all on iPhones, which I'm pretty sure is fairly common in most Western countries

iOS market share is 60% in the US which is the highest worldwide, and only above 50% in a handful of other countries (UK, Japan, Oz, Canada)[0]. If you have any friends who are not rich, or are European or South American, there's a good chance they won't iMessage you but try to add you on WhatsApp.

[0]https://deviceatlas.com/blog/android-v-ios-market-share

>If you have any friends who are not rich, or are European or South American

One: 55-60% market share in the US, by definition, is not confined to "the rich."

As to the other categories: my personal answer to "If you have any friends that aren't American" is "that's what whatsapp is for." I imagine for a lot of people the answer is that, or "I don't, actually."

Like, all the teenagers in my family. Their list of non-US friends is near-zero. Their non-US family are all on whatsapp.

They don't experience a gap.

In my social circle everyone uses something completely different, not just for messaging.

I need all of Threema, Signal, Skype, iMessage and email just for my closest friends and family.

I also need Google Photos, Google Drive and OneDrive to share data with them.

Apple is the most anti-social platform of them all. I can't even use it to share photos with my wife.

I have never used FaceTime with anyone, because no one uses it, not even those who do have iPhones, because they all have to use something else to communicate with others.

> [...] which I'm pretty sure is fairly common in most Western countries.

It's really not, at least in continental Europe. Here in Germany Android's like 70% of the market and nobody uses iMessage or FaceTime.

Norway is my primary point of reference in this regard.

Even when it's not majority, I agree with sgt that initially the experience was much, much better than with other apps, especially for the older people in my family.

It degraded a bit, however, with the time. Adding features is not to the benefit of the less young, whereas young tolerate UI getting more complex and less intuitive.

Only 40% of people have iPhone in the Netherlands, for example. Everyone uses whatsapp.

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