That’s not a mystery. iPhone market share is highest in the US. You can’t use iMessage if most other people you are interacting with are using WhatsApp. There

That’s not a mystery. iPhone market share is highest in the US. You can’t use iMessage if most other people you are interacting with are using WhatsApp. There is a real need for better messaging than SMS and MMS. In particular easy sharing of photos and videos is the crucial and central feature. Easy group messaging is probably another important aspect. So both WhatsApp and iMessage provide these valuable features, however the best messaging service is of no use if you can’t communicate with the people you want to communicate with. Because of the Android and iOS duopoly I would typically expect the cross platform solution to win out for such a use case, even if it is a bit more inconvenient. What iMessage has going for it is that it has a relatively transparent fallback mode – I think that made it even possible for it to compete. However, the US is still the clear aberration here, not the rest of the world. It seems to just have worked out there in a way where the critical mass of iOS was there to make this happen and last (at least for a bit). Still, I can’t see the big crime Apple supposedly committed here. Their approach of building on top of SMS is completely valid and makes tons of sense.