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Comment by aryonoco | Hacker News Reader

I'm in Australia, and here iPhones have about 50% of the smartphone market, with the other half being Android of course.

I obviously know many iPhone users, including my wife and many close friends. I know of no one who uses iMessage. Here everyone uses Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp (and to a lesser extent Telegram and Signal).

Is this iMessage fascinating a US thing? Why?

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I’m in Australia, and iMessage usage here is huge and I have to assume the reason you’re not aware of it is because you dont have an iPhone.

Everyone I know with an iPhone chooses iMessages for texts and group chats first, and only reverts to WhatsApp when someone on Android has to be involved.

In the US almost everyone uses SMS. iMessage uses the same app as SMS, changing the message type based on whether the recipient can accept iMessages. So, most iPhone-to-iPhone communication ends up being SMS because we don’t have to change what we’re used to.

s/being SMS/being iMessage/

iMessage in the US took over before WhatsApp or Messenger landed. So it's still going strong based on that (although I wouldn't want to switch to a FB product, so I may be biased.) But SMSs are free and therefore the number of people who use SMS (or RCS, whatever it's followup is), is really high.

SMS is not free while traveling abroad. I know most people int he USA don't travel abroad but I do and is one reason I detest SMS. Further it's tied to my phone number, something I'd prefer not to give out.

If you don't like SMS requiring people to know your phone number, wait until you hear how Signal and WhatsApp work.

iMessage also works abroad (in fact, I tend to use iMessage when abroad because it appears to US based iPhone customers identical to domestic texts.)

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