4 ms·
A major difference is that in the US text messages and MMS are usually free, so there's not a lot of pressure to move to a different communication medium. In lo
by gst 10y ago
A major difference is that in the US text messages and MMS are usually free, so there's not a lot of pressure to move to a different communication medium. In lots of other countries you pay several cents for each individual text message and MMS cost several tens of cents. And this is for domestic messages. With international messages (which you often use because you're country is likely to be much smaller than the US) the costs are often insane and can reach more than a dollar per message. Basically providers in those countries stopped competing with apps like Whatsapp. They still offer a texting service, but they're not trying to get someone to use it, because they already lost the battle.
- SlashmanX 10y agoSMS' can be free in a lot of European countries, the main difference is that MMS didn't really take off in Europe as much as it did in the US so they usually cost more. Also since people weren't that attached to MMS, it was easy to 'replace'
- TorKlingberg 10y agoFor most of the 2000's MMS didn't work until you went into settings and entered an MMS gateway address or something. Which nobody did since they never used MMS anyway.
- dx034 10y agoAt least here in the UK SMS' are usually free (or very cheap) but whatsapp is popular since it's very easy to use, allows group chats/voice messages and works well when the connection isn't great. But mostly because it works on virtually every platform (even some feature phones), so you can assume that basically everyone has it.
- wutbrodo 10y ago> A major difference is that in the US text messages and MMS are usually free, so there's not a lot of pressure to move to a different communication medium. I'm not sure that's true. At least in my sample, there are quite a few people who explicitly ask you to use some chat app instead of texting them, because they don't pay for unlimited texting.