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Comment by lol768 | Hacker News Reader

This isn't a technical problem. Nobody really uses iMessage enough in the EU, but in the USA where people seem to shun use of third-party messaging apps like WhatsApp, the solution would be to deem Apple a "gatekeeper" under legislation equivalent to the Digital Markets Act and force interoperability via regulation given Apple's market dominance.

The regulatory process has worked with side-loading, and EU citizens will be better off as a result once the functionality is made available, in the same way as not needing to buy a pointless proprietary cable.

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It’s not that it’s active shunning, things just evolved here into two systems (RCS and iMessage) and a lowest common denominator (SMS) they both fall back to automatically.

So there is VERY little friction. You can message anyone easily without downloading anything, though the experience varies.

So the idea of downloading an additional app for certain people is kind of odd.

If you live somewhere everyone uses WeChat, you download that once when you setup your phone and you’re done. If everyone uses a mix then you’re used to swapping between apps.

A lot of Americans aren’t, historically it hasn’t been needed by a lot of people who only communicate with other Americans.

It's bizarre though; despite the apparent lack of friction I don't know anyone who uses RCS or SMS (and frankly I'm unimpressed by its design - why involve carriers at all? Your mobile network should be dumb and provide you with a simple, neutral, fast and unmetered TCP/IP connection. RCS also launched without E2E encryption. Frankly the whole protocol seems like garbage to me and nobody in the UK cares about it, there are countless messaging apps to choose from that architected this properly, that are unrelated to your mobile carrier).

I’ve always had an iPhone, so I can’t speak to RCS with a lot of authority.

I assume the path was like iMessage. People used the default messaging app which used SMS. One day it got an upgrade and just started using RCS if the other person was providing a better experience.

It wasn’t an active choice to switch to it, just the power of defaults. I guarantee you that no normal person knows what RCS is by name. At most they would know that sending messages to iPhones is somehow “different“ and it doesn’t work as well (SMS fallback).

Also sort of makes me wonder if the “open iMessage” stuff will all be sort of a tempest in a teapot within a year or so. Once iPhones get RCS I wonder if people will care that much outside of ideological reasons.

Almost 80 million users of whatsapp in the US (330m pop) vs 120 million users in all of Europe (746m pop) kind of undermines that line of reasoning? If anything, the US uses whatsapp way more than Europe.

If we were looking at true third party messaging platforms that aren't owned by trillion dollar mega corps that can push their products onto every phone, then... maybe? The US barely uses Telegram compared to Europe, and signal's website sees about as much use from the US as it does from only Germany. But if the argument is about the US using iMessage more because they don't use other messaging platforms, then no, the numbers do not bear that out at all.

Sorry a quick Google suggests your figures for EU users is very inaccurate. Do you have a source?

The same Google.

As I understand it different regions of Europe use different messaging apps, but none use SMS, though the UK uses it more. As far as I know Telegram is particularly popular in Eastern Europe.

> but none use SMS

Why are you so certain of that? Where I am their popularity has been declining over the years but a lot of people are still used to sending them (they have been very cheap/free here since the mid 2000s at least). WhatsApp isn't that huge here either (FB Messenger is though).

These numbers can't possibly be true.

I might be living in a massive bubble, but WhatsApp is the canonical successor of SMS in Europe, while the few WhatsApp users that I've met in the US almost all use it to stay in touch with friends or family abroad.

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