they're free

They were not always free, and when they were, they were up to a limit. Yes the limit was something absurd, but surprisingly, some people did hit them.

That's why as soon as phones had easy access to the web and enough bandwidth to last a month, people started treating SMS like a last resort, and I have not met a single culture on Earth that didn't think this way in the transition period up to when what you said became universally true.

Plus... People don't want to message only their "contacts", nor want their phone address book filled with trash. Mindblowing, know, who would have thought (other than US apple users????). Facebook's Messenger was one of the earliest to give that to the wide public and it got heavily adopted. But people moved on from even that.

They're not "free", many places still charge per SMS. Even if your country doesn't, you NEED an SMS plan, which costs more than a basic data-only plan. SMS is extremely unsecure. They don't work "everywhere", especially if you're travelling, and your country charges extreme fees to receive SMS out of country (for reference, Canadian carriers charge $15/day to use your phone outside Canada. That's one expensive ass text..).

That being said, I think it's crazy that a large portion of Europe has adopted WhatsApp. I wouldn't touch that Meta garbage with a 100 kilometre pole.

They're limited as hell and buggy. The thing that most bothers me is the character limit and then your device sends out multiple SMSs, other devices may not understand that and instead of receiving one message you receive multiple broken ones.

Accents, anything not in the English alphabet: á ä ā ą é ê and so on, good luck with those.

Attaching media is a nightmare, basically the entire MMS protocol is broken.

You're relying on your carrier and your recipients carriers.

International messaging is also completely broken for the reason above. You can forget any media in that case too.

Geez I don't know if I should continue. Did you know SMS was not a feature planned in phones originally but rather it takes advantage of a bug that was never fixed?

In Brazil where I'm originally from people stopped using SMS altogether as soon as the first iPhone got in the market. Android followed shortly after. Viber was the popular choice back then, now WhatsApp is the standard.

They are not free here but since like no one other than my grandma uses them it's not really important.

Thye are free now. Sms used to be a "per text" charge. Phone plans had "100 txt free/month, then $.05/each" deals, along with "300 free minutes/month." This went on for years.

It was during this time that other countries started using "data only" apps that didn't have per message fee, which was their killer feature, and they stuck with them.

Charging for SMS was of course brutal profit seeking. The messages have always been embedded in the largely empty "where am i" pings that cellphones have to always be sending to towers to work at all. They were 100% free for phone carriers to send and receive.