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Comment by huevosabio | Hacker News Reader

Completely uninformed question, doesn't this fight just push people to WhatsApp?

I never use SMS, and no one in Mexico does either. My friends in Europe seem to largely use WhatsApp as well. So it really seems like Americans are outliers in their choice for iMessage / SMS.

So, wouldn't this push Americans to WhatsApp?

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I think what happened is that Americans got unlimited SMS plans meaning they got used to just communicating by SMS. Europe got WhatsApp to deal with wild SMS pricing. So Europeans moved over to WhatsApp etc. Americans continued using SMS. Apple took advantage of this with iMessage silently upgrading stuff to their protocol. On top of this iPhone penetration in many places in the US is much higher I think.

Wild SMS pricing in Europe? Unlimited SMS has been the default in Denmark for at least 15 years.

In the Netherlands WhatsApp became popular because they offered free SMS.

Well, Denmark is not the whole of Europe.

In Switzerland, free texts to non-Swiss numbers is expensive/rather uncommon. Instant Messaging is free to anyone the the world. Thus, SMS are dead (except for 2FA).

Most people who use iMessage here have literally no idea this is even happening and would not care if I told them. It's still just as hard as it's always been to get all of your friends/contacts to "just switch to WhatsApp".

Also, pretty sure the overlap of "would ever want to use Whatsapp" and "cares about iMessage at all" is zero. Either you have Apple Status Symbol people, or you have "Meta can die in a fire entirely" or "idk, I just use SMS and some people have iMessage". The first and last groups aren't gonna switch, and the middle are probably only ever going to use Telegram or Signal.

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