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Only the EU can save Android in the US now
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this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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Are WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Signal, and such blocked in the US? What's with that whining about iMessage?
Of course they're not blocked.
People just default to the app that comes pre-installed with their phone and sits right there on the first screen, because it's marginally easier than picking a third party app in the App Store, installing it, and creating an account.
It's the exact same argument that Microsoft made when they bundled Internet Explorer with their OS.
Cannot confirm this is the case with messaging apps in the EU. Nobody uses iMessage and nobody uses whatever the current Google thing is each year. WhatsApp is dominat despite not being preinstalled on any major phone brand (certainly not Samsung and Apple).
Apples to oranges.
The reason is that messaging services like WhatsApp became popular in Europe because carriers charged exorbitant fees for SMS messaging at a time when no single phone manufacturer absolutely dominated the market. Apps like WhatsApp made it possible to communicate with people, no matter which specific phone or brand or platform they were using.
If the iPhone (with iMessage pre-installed) had been the dominant smartphone and ecosystem at the time, chances are that what's happening in the US would have happened in Europe in exactly the same way.
It's exactly the same argument as with Windows and Internet Explorer: if Windows had been one podunk operating system out of many, nobody would have cared. The whole issue was that Microsoft used the market dominance of Windows to quasi-lock users into Internet Explorer.
No, it's not. Maybe I've looked at the wrong numbers but according to https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-share/ iPhones have a market share of 50–60% in the US, not 90% like Windows on PCs. It shouldn't result in total iMessage dominance. If anything the somewhat equal market share should mean that Telegram/Signal/WhatApp/whatever should be especially popular.
"Market dominance" simply means that a single company has the means to shape the entire market - not that it must have 90+ percent market share.
You're essentially arguing that it's easier for a user to find a third party app in the App Store, install it, create an account in the app, and start messaging than it is to start messaging with the pre-installed first party app.
I don't find that persuasive.
It works in the rest of the world. Not hyperbole. In literally the rest of the world manages to do that. Only in the US does half of the user base let itself get bullied by the other half, instead of just using a service that works equally well on both. And while it's technically "create an account in the app", no normie user feels that an account is being created. Works with phone number, just enter a verification code, done.
It's like how the US got so far ahead with reliable universal twisted-pair phone lines, it took a lot longer here for people to really start having just a mobile phone compared to countries that were able to side-step their inadequate landline infrastructure with mobile phone services. WhatsApp largely gained prominence in countries that had much more cost effective data plans than SMS texting, making WhatsApp cheaper than SMS along with being available at all on Android (vs iMessage). In the US we had unlimited SMS messages included in plans before anything approaching that for data. So in the US SMS was already quite well entrenched in social circles by the time iMessage came out. And Apple knew that people wouldn't be so loyal to iMessage if they couldn't message with whatever non-trivial percentage of the social circle didn't have an iPhone so it inlucded SMS-fallback. There's plenty of WhatsApp and Signal users in the US at this point. But nobody cares enough to try and get everyone to switch to one platform that is available everywhere and doesn't have SMS fallback, so SMS is still the glue that holds all the messaging together in the US.
edit: I think I can safely say it's going to take the big 3 carriers in the US all agreeing to drop SMS (which pretty much will probably take the GSM standards body dropping SMS) for the US to truly move off of it.
That's only valid if you're comparing the US with 3rd World nations.
When mobile phones took of, even poor peripheral southern european nations (like mine) already had good fixed line telephone infrastructures and certainly the few people who didn't have a phone line yet weren't the kind that could afford early mobile phones.
In reality the fast growth in mobile phone adoption in the EU vs US is a case study in how top down enforced standardization can help markets: whilst the US had multiple network standards which required diferent phones and were incompatible with each other, in Europe governments were forcing mobile carriers (by making it a condition to get a radio spectrum license to operate as one) to use GSM, so all phones were compatible and pretty much from day 1 you could, for example, use your phone in a different country even though it was linked to a diferent carrier in your home-country.
Because of this, even though the mobile phone infrastructure started behind that of the US, it and mobile phone adoption grew much faster than in the fragmented US market and this was what allowed Nokia from Finland to, for a while, be the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the World (most of which they lost when smartphones became a thing).
Eventually the US itself ended up doing the same thing, if I remember it correctly by around the late 90s with v3 of GSM.
Those are valid observations, but the different technologies all terminated to the POTS network, so phone calls across networks always worked. But it was just considerably more expensive to make phone calls on mobile than land lines where you could get flat-rate unlimited calling (local, not long distance, getting a cell phone then could potentially be cheaper for long distance). It was the early 00s when flat-rate unlimited plans were becoming common in the US, and that's when people started ditching their land lines.
AT&T was notable for being the first one (of the Big 3) here using internationally compatible GSM in the 90s. But it actually wasn't until LTE that Verizon stopped using CDMA for data (but they still used it for voice) in 2010 when we finally started seeing things trend towards adopting a common standard in the Big 3 national carriers. Sprint went with Wi-MAX instead of LTE for data at that time, and having to retool to LTE was one of the financial straws that broke their back.
It was exactly the same in Europe in terms of fixed line vs mobile call prices and ultimate connectivity.
The difference is that any mobile phone (the actual device) that worked for any one carrier in Europe would work for any other carrier in Europe, and although that carriers did try to lock-in customers with contracts and even carrier subsidized network locked phones, it was still possible to change carriers (especially after supporting number portability was made mandatory) plus roaming just seamlessly worked when moving all around Europe (turning the potential problem of market fragmentation in Europe into a strength as rather than a handful of continent-wide carriers with spotty coverage in some places, in Europe local carriers focused on local coverage and access when outside your carrier's are was provided via some other carrier via roaming).
I remember the talk on the Internet at the time (I've had a mobile phone since the 90s) and how americans constantly complained of the need of different phones for different carriers and the uneveness of countrywide coverage, unlike in Europe were if you bought your own "mobile phone" it would just work with whatever carrier you chose.
(Mind you, carriers tried to lock-in customers with locked phones, which funilly enough resulted in the mushrooming of little stores which would unlock your phone, all perfectly legal).
And yeah, LTE was part of GSM v3, hence why I mentioned it as the point when the US finally standardized its mobile network.
I don't disagree with you about different network technologies being a hindrance, but I was focused on things that make an analog to why SMS is so much more entrenched in the US. Clearly not a perfect analogy was made. :)
SMS used to be really entrenched in the EU also ... and overly expensive (given that, at least at first, they were limited by the protocol to about 180 bytes).
However when data smartphones became more common and data speeds became decent (roughly by the time of GSM v3 and LTE) people kinda figured out that if even a shit data plan was (back then) 10 euros for 100MB, paying 10 cents for a message of 180 characters was really was the mobile phone providers taking the piss and started using messaging solutions that used their dataplan, not the GSM network SMS protocol.
All this happenned in the smartphone age, so beyond the time when mobile phone interoperability was a problem in the US but not in the EU.
The strange difference with the US in this, IMHO, is how Europe ended up with mobile phone independent solutions rather than phone specific ones.
I feel like you didn't read their whole initial comment and hyper focused on the analogy instead of what they were talking about. Their comment is literally about the difference between US and Europe and why they ended up with different solutions for messaging. (high SMS fees in Europe vs unlimited SMS in the US).
Yeah, that's probably true :/
I tried to use the Google chat apps. There were some nice ones. ( still missing allo). But they changed too often, so now no Google chat app anymore.
It's not that I'm unable to install an app on my phone and learn how to use it, it's that I'm unable to convince every person I know to install that app, then teach them all how to use it.
100% of iPhone users have iMessage. And they can use the same app to talk to 100% of their contacts.
Fragmentation is a huge problem for everything else. What percentage of Android users have any particular one of those apps you listed?
I only grudgingly install WhatsApp when I travel to Europe. Discordv and Slack are not really competitors in this space (though I'm sure there's a small subset of users who use them that way). I have Signal and Telegram and yet I still use SMS with most of my contacts because that's the only one that is guaranteed to work.
I've tried getting my friends onto Signal, with some amount of success. But many have eventually stopped using it because I was the only one they used it with. A couple of my iPhone-using family members reported that they stopped getting notifications from Signal because they used it so infrequently that iOS basically disabled it (I guess it does that after a month of disuse but I'm not sure exactly).
It's a losing battle. We've fallen back to SMS.
WhatApp is installed on little bit under 100% among all Android phones and iPhones in most EU countries and should the EU actually tackle messenger interoperability, iMessage is definitively not the main target. The most die-hard Apple fans I know use iMessage for a little bit when new features were introduced. Then they go back to WhatsApp like everybody else.
To be clear: I'm not an advocate of WhatApp here, I'm merely explaining that the EU does not care at all about Apple's chat service nobody in the EU uses. Should any legislation even affect iMessage, it'll be more coincidental, not targeted at it.
I don't know about the rest of the world but in the UK text messages used to cost 10p for each one you send. Multimedia messages were like 40p. Really expensive. WhatsApp came about and made both of these free. The rest is history.
Ironically, SMS are generally free these days but nobody obviously uses them. My SMS app is just full of OTP codes being sent to me.
This seems to have happened in most of the world. The US still sticks to SMS because it is free since before chat apps became a thing. SMS was a terrible experience because you would pay per message thanks to carriers’ greed. It didn’t keep up with the demand for constant communication.
Nowadays in Brazil SMS is also free, but by the point they did that, WhatsApp had already become ubiquitous, and had much better features such as sending location, consistent experience with features over different devices, group chats with moderation, voice messages, free voice calls to any user over the world, etc., besides being built from scratch as an SMS substitute (would simply use your mobile number). No one would willingly go back to SMS.
Seems like only some Asian countries defaulted to a different app such as Kakao Talk.
There was Kik Messenger back then but it was more like an anonymous chat app.
You're from Brazil? I just want to say, if English is not your native language you'd have a hard time convincing me it isn't.
SMS is the same in the UK these days. Free. MMS isn't though. They still like to scam the older users who know no better.
THE BEST OS ever /s
Android does the same thing. I stopped getting telegram notifications because I hadn't opened it up in a month. It's a privacy feature. If you haven't used an app in a while, it removes all the permissions it had.
It’s so dumb. I have the same problem. I have an iPhone and I try to get them to use Signal, but they just keep using SMS and we keep getting garbage video being sent over group text since some of the group uses Android. When I complain they start putting stuff in Google Photo Albums instead of just using a decent messenger.
It's sad and I don't have it but here in Europe Whatsapp doesn't seem far from 100%!
Who tf wants read receipts? The first thing I do on a new phone is make sure that shit is turned off.