Yeah, it's... pretty dumb, IMO.

If we want to talk about technical issues, though, it's pretty stark. MMS delivery and message ordering is significantly less reliable than pretty much any OTT service out there. Message size limitations mean videos get recompressed to garbage when you send them. There are basically no add-on features, like reacting with emoji to messages, for example.

The disappointing thing is that there's a solution to all of this: RCS[0]. Android supports it, but Apple of course loves their iMessage walled garden and refuses to, even though RCS has end-to-end encryption now. iMessage may be technically superior in some ways, and RCS certainly has its issues, but personally I feel interop is much more important here.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

That is interesting. Before whatsapp showed up, they costed like 25 cents each for a very long time here.

Here in the UK I think WhatsApp took off here based on the strength of the group chat. Now people use it (and Facebook Messenger) for everything.

That was in 2009-2010 when WhatsApp came out.

By that time SMS were free and unlimited under most plans in the US but not in other places. WhatsApp, Viber, LINE etc. caught the non-US markets rapidly as a free alternative to an expensive service. These messaging apps didn't do as well in the US, as they had an equally free built-in alternative (SMS).

Later, most operators made SMS free everywhere, but it was already too late.

10 years later, we still see the same results.

There's a mix, but everyone would have sent me messages via WhatsApp at that time.

Now I'm one of those people that uninstalled WhatsApp and told all of my contacts that I'm moving to Signal. I'm still not getting any iMessage messages and >90% of my incoming SMS are from bots.

WhatsApp are on the phones that people want, including iPhones.

iMessage is on the phone that iPhone users want.

Neither of those is lock in.

Folk with iPhones will still get those IMs though. shrug

In the UK too, and yeah, at both my sons primary school and secondary school it was just expected that you had WhatsApp to be added to the year group and class WhatsApp groups. It's to the point where getting an SMS that isn't a notification from a business is really weird. A lot of people even asks what your WhatsApp is rather than what your phone number is, even though they're the same thing.