In the U.S.A., people use iMessage by default, because they use text messaging. People don't use texts in Europe (we use WhatsApp and similar, but WhatsApp by a long margin).
The reason people still use texts in the U.S.A. is up for debate, and it's something I've thought about for a long time.
I think it's a historical artifact -- by the time that iMessage launched, the US was well into the phase of free, unlimited texting, so there was no barrier to "just texting". Since there was also no barrier (in terms of costs, subscriptions, or installation friction) to using iMessage, it was a drop-in upgrade of the user experience for SMS.
In contrast, I still have to pay a fee to send SMS messages to my European relatives, so there's a financial incentive to overcome that initial friction to switch messaging provider.
Yeah, as an American who actually knows a fair number of people overseas, there are probably a literal handful of people who I communicate with on a regular basis there and I use a variety of channels but SMS/iMessage works fine one a day-to-day basis for most folks.
The US probably moved to SMS being basically free (domestically) before Europe did. As a result it seems that the US standardized on SMS (and basically transparently iMessage) because that's what was just there. I never get a Whatsapp message from someone in the US and rarely anything other than SMS/iMessage. I suspect the vast majority of people I know don't have Whatsapp installed. I use it with people I know internationally.
> More importantly, most Americas do not text anyone outside of the country, and haven't really ever
As a dual-citizen of Canada and the US, I'd have to say that's massively overgeneralized. Pretty much every Canadian I know regularly texts with Americans (iMessage or not), which means those Americans are texting with people outside of the Country.
The USA and Canada are really the same country, as far as the telcos are concerned. They're part of the same North American phone system, and have the same +1 prefix. Calls between the countries are all free, and don't carry international charges. You might think they're separate countries, and the governments may agree, but the telecom companies disagree.
> by the time that iMessage launched, the US was well into the phase of free, unlimited texting
The iPhone itself launched with unlimited data, but limited text messages.
> keep in mind that AT&T's default rate plans for the iPhone don't include unlimited SMS messages: they include 200 messages per month unless you add an extra-SMS plan. Chatting this way can easily rack up your SMS charges if you're not careful.
When iMessage launched as part of iOS 5, free unlimited SMS was still not a normal thing.
> iMessage is Apple's answer to SMS and MMS—a way to send text and multimedia messages to other iOS device users without relying on a cell carrier. Any kind of text-type message between iOS users can be sent for free in unlimited amounts without chipping away at those overpriced text messages that you pay for through your carrier.
> When iMessage launched as part of iOS 5, free unlimited SMS was still not a normal thing.
It wasn’t universal on all wireless plans, for sure, but by 2011, in the U.S., it was definitely more common that at least for smartphone plans, which were starting to shift into charging for amounts of data usage rather than blanket “unlimited” buckets and were also starting to charge extra fees for tethering (this is also the time that LTE became real and usable in the U.S.), you’d get unlimited or seemingly nearly unlimited messaging plans as part of the fee.
Carriers had been offering large or unlimited text plans for years at this point — my SideKick in high school had unlimited texting as part of the $20 a month fee that T-Mobile charged on top of the minutes plan to operate the software. BlackBerry took advantage of this too with its BIS plans on carriers and the “free texting” lure of BlackBerry via BBM and SMS was a big selling point of those devices for sure.
But the key here is “for smartphone plans.” You still had a lot of non-smartphone users in 2011 and so part of the pitch to get them to spend $500 on a phone that would require a $50 a month plan was unlimited texts. iMessage was a nice carrot here
What I think iMessage did was not only spur carriers to cut the SMS fees even further (again, for smartphone plans), but it was a great additional reason to get people to adopt smartphones. Because the sort of unspoken rule was that if you had a smartphone in the U.S., you had unlimited texting. Most people in the U.S. don’t text people outside the U.S. so unless you have family or friends in other countries or you do a lot of international business, I think SMS was just sort of an accepted default for a lot of people.
So the timing for iMessage in the U.S. was perfect because it used the same default app everyone used, could work on your Mac or iPad or iPod touch too AND it worked internationally with other iPhones. Plus blue bubbles and the many significant technical and security improvements over the old way. But mostly blue bubbles.
But as the other poster said, the lure of BBM and later WhatsApp in the rest of the world was largely that you could use it internationally for free. And the iPhone didn’t get its strong international adoption until after things like WhatsApp had already landed.
The iPhone’s initial carrier restrictions didn’t start to lift until 2011-ish and 2012 so you had Android growing extremely quickly in Europe and Latin America and Asia, where a thing like WhatsApp (which debuted first on iPhone in 2009, it then came to BlackBerry and then in 2010 Android and Symbian) could grow like a weed and have hundreds of millions of users before most people in the U.S. had even heard of it. (I was on CNN and Fox Business in 2014 explaining what WhatsApp was and why Facebook had just spent $20b on it).
So I think timing on iMessage was perfect for U.S. domination (where iPhone marketshare is over 50% but depending on your demographic/age, is probably even higher) but it might have just missed being the defacto tool in the rest of the world.
No one cared about blue bubbles when iMessage launched, because it hadn't yet become symbolic of "in the ecosystem, can be in group chats without breaking certain features." (In fact, I'm not even sure how many of the user-facing group chat features that break with SMS were even present in 2011...)
The idea that "blue bubbles" were somehow a major driver of iMessage adoption when it first debuted is rank historical revisionism to fit a narrative that isn't even all that universal today.
> In contrast, I still have to pay a fee to send SMS messages to my European relatives, so there's a financial incentive to overcome that initial friction to switch messaging provider.
In addition to the financial disincentive for SMS in the EU, communications iMessage to iMessage are E2EE whereas SMS messages are not, even in the context of iMessage to SMS and vice versa.
Also also, Whatsapp’s E2EE is not as reassuring given Meta/Facebook owns Whatsapp.
> In contrast, I still have to pay a fee to send SMS messages to my European relatives
Oh wow, yeah that's definitely a big reason people would use what's app instead. That's wild to think about and makes no sense. Any idea why that is? Is it regulatory reasons maybe?
The reason is simply that phone calls across Europe were and are usually not free/included in flat rate plans. Telcos just never found a way to agree on something that makes sense: It's quite common to get unlimited domestic calls, but pay 10-30 cents per minute to a neighboring country.
Nobody (other than businesses) actually pays that; people just ended up using WhatsApp for both calls and texts instead.
So in a way it's the absence of regulation: Data roaming is free within the EU, thanks to a corresponding EU regulation; before that, it wasn't unusual to pay more than EUR 10 per Megabyte (yes, Megabyte, not Gigabyte).
Regulation 2018/1971 limits the price for outgoing calls within the EEA to 0.19 ct/minute (excl. VAT). Interestingly enough, there doesn't seem to be a limit on incoming calls, though most providers don't charge for incoming calls.
There's no charge for incoming calls from abroad while at home: All EU countries use "caller pays" billing (unlike the US, which historically has used shared cost for mobile phones).
That's why there are prepaid SIMs without a monthly fee and unlimited incoming calls: The caller's operator pays the called operator a termination charge by the minute.
There is an incoming call charge while roaming, the rationale being that the caller doesn't know where you are and needs predictability in pricing (so the called party pays for the leg from their home country to where they are), but the EU has capped that to zero within the EEA.
Yes. Most of the plans of the provider that I use in the US (T-Mobile) include free SMS and MMS to any country (also free data roaming in almost any country). I think it's similar for other providers (Verizon and AT&T), but I'm not sure as I'm not familiar with their plans.
Makes sense. Another thing that occurred to me a while ago was that iPhones have a 61% market share in the U.S.A., whereas Android dominates in Europe (65%). So it could well be that people in Europe with iPhones don't bother trying to use iMessage because it's statistically unlikely the recipient has an iPhone.
Agreed, and additionally, at that time there were no significant SMS alternatives in the US, most people had dumb phones, and no messaging apps came with the sort of supplementary features we have grown accustomed to in the past ten years.
Yeah, actually until I finally haggled for a better plan maybe ~5 years ago, it used to cost me $0.25 to send an SMS to anyone, even in my own country (Canada)...
Canada IMO does take the crown of having the absolute worst telecoms. It’s absolutely astounding to see some of the stuff they pull sometimes. I remember being younger and wanting to unlock a phone from Rogers. They wanted $125 for this act of changing a row in a database
Yeah, this reminds me, mine and my wife's bills inexplicably went up by like $5 this month, so now I have to investigate as to why our plans that have been locked in at a certain rate for years on end are now suddenly costing us more, without any notification to us. Gotta love it.
How much does the cheapest mobile plan that offers "free and unlimited" texting cost in the US? Quick look at t-mobile shows $15/month for unlimited texts.
Exactly. When my wife and I were younger we would easily send over 3000 sms messages to each other per month; I remember the number because my family saw it on my phone bill and thought it was absurd. Jumping on an unlimited sms plan for an extra $10-15 per month was a no brainer versus paying $0.10 per sms.
US was a first-mover and had early telcom penetration, so SMS became culturally ubiquitous since it was the tech of the era. Late-movers could skip that and go straight to data-based telcoms and never had to deal with the critical culture mass of SMS while the US was stuck bolting on to and bridging SMS.
It's like being able to skip over copper and go straight to fiber optics.
> US was a first-mover and had early telcom penetration, so SMS became culturally ubiquitous since it was the tech of the era.
Telco penetration – yes, the US had a upper hand. SMS (and messaging) – no, the US lagged behind for many years.
DAMPS (the 2nd generation mobile standard in the US) and early CDMA US networks did not support SMS/text messaging at all whereas European telco users had already been happily texting each other since the introduction of GSM (2G, early 90s). Americans used the phone answering machines and the voicemail instead, which has been widely depicted in Hollywood movies and was a source of amusement for non-US watchers.
GSM was later introduced in the US with very limited coverage on east and west coasts to support roaming for European users (roaming was non-existand in DAMPS and in CDMA networks, either) and operated on a frequency band (1900 MHz) that was incompatible with GSM 2G 900/1800 MHz bands and required a tri-band handset but it introduced SMS to the US mobile networks users for the first time.
There was also a pricing barrier that hampered adoption of SMS in the US – European and Asian users had to pay for SMS's they have sent, but not receive one (the cost was zero), whereas the US users had to pay to send AND to receive text messages. Gradually, 3G came to the US, brought SMS out of the box, gradually replaced DAMPS and CDMA networks in the US and the US users got SMS out of the box.
The US did not lead the cultural revolution that SMS had brought about in Europe/Asia.
I don't know about that. I remember back in the nineties we were all using SMS in England. Pretty much all my friends had a mobile, and we treated SMS like social media DMs.
One really weird way that you can see that is looking at Denmark, which has historically been used as a test market for telcos. SMS was practically free when iMessage was announced, not entirely, but enough people had unlimited SMS plans at that time. Denmark was the testing ground for different phones and pricing plans, better to screw up in a market with 5 million people, compared to one with 80 million.
I believe that the "free" SMSs at the time is a pretty big reason why iMessage is huge in Denmark, but not in the countries surrounding us. It's not the biggest messaging platform, that would be Facebook and Facebook messenger, not WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal. It seems like people want Europe to be all in on "alternative" platforms, but it's frequently all Facebook properties.
IOS is the dominating mobile OS in Denmark, everyone I know uses iMessage.
I wonder if the 0.5 cent fee on free installs will change anything, will the train ticketing app start charging a subscription fee on IOS now that they need to pay per install Apple?
That fee is only if the developer opts into the new terms. They are welcome to continue with the current App Store terms indefinitely and pay nothing per install.
Aside from status-conscious teenagers (eww, green vs. blue) pretty much no one in the US cares whether you're on standard SMS vs. iMessage. But I pretty much only use WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger with friends overseas.
In Italy, in 2005-2007 text messages were WIDELY used by teenagers in (like me at the time) too - they weren't free but really cheap (4000 for 2€/month) so pretty much everyone used them.
Then a couple years later... gone, replaced by WhatsApp.
In that the EU does not sit idle once you become a significantly popular player in a given market, not in the sense that they were given free userbase. E.g. in this case if iPhones became more popular then they'd have to open up iMessage where as in the US having market dominance comes with significantly fewer strings attached.
In certain demographics in the USA (teenagers, young adults) the usage of iMessage is around 90%.
It's a defacto monopoly but nothing is done about it from an anti-monopoly perspective. Such as forcing Apple to adopt open standards and interoperability. This market dominance does have a very real impact in which products people will and can realistically consume.
I think maybe coming from a geeky background we might be quick to think such things are irrelevant but I don't think they are.
