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Haha, in Germany I do not know a single person using iMessage. In my social bubble it is like WhatsApp > Signal > Telegram > Threema > Facebook Messanger
by razemio 5y ago
Haha, in Germany I do not know a single person using iMessage. In my social bubble it is like WhatsApp > Signal > Telegram > Threema > Facebook Messanger
- sys_64738 5y agoAs you get older you'll likely fallback to the default iMessages app. Those others are just fads to me the kids like to use.
- entropyie 5y agoWhatsApp is 13 years old, like it or not, it is not a fad. I've seen it used on Nokia's with Symbian and series 40 candy bar phones 10 years ago. Outside the USA it dwarfs iMessage and will continue to do so for a very long time. Everyone in my extended family uses it, from 15 to 85 years old.
- leoedin 5y agoIn the UK everyone uses WhatsApp. Certainly everyone I meet my age or older. Maybe the kids are doing something differently, but I doubt it. iPhone usage just hasn't quite got high enough for iMessage to be seamless. Maybe it's similar in Germany?
- vidarh 5y agoIn the UK too, and yeah, at both my sons primary school and secondary school it was just expected that you had WhatsApp to be added to the year group and class WhatsApp groups. It's to the point where getting an SMS that isn't a notification from a business is really weird. A lot of people even asks what your WhatsApp is rather than what your phone number is, even though they're the same thing.
- distances 5y agoIn which country? I also don't know a single person using iMessage, and the last non-auth SMS I received was years and years ago. It's as good as dead basically.
- ramphastidae 5y agoIt’s not because you’re older or because of fads, it’s because you don’t message anyone outside of the US.
- eertami 5y agoI don't see what age has to do with it. My parents and grandparents message their friends using WhatsApp (in Europe).
- detaro 5y agoWith a bunch of local/social group variation which order these are in.
- razemio 5y agoRight, changed it to "in my social bubble". Still with iMessage I have never seen anybody using it here.
- BossingAround 5y agoWhile I have the same experience, I believe this is called social bubble. I do not know many teenagers, and I don't visit high schools to see what trends are popular among them to assess whether they prefer to use Threema over iMessage.
- razemio 5y agoYou are right. Changed the wording to "my social bubble". Still these services I would consider popular in Germany in no particular order.
- Kipters 5y agoItaly here, same.
- hombre_fatal 5y agoThe US had an early incumbent SMS culture that never gripped most other countries, so iMessage is here to stay. Outside the US I have friends in their 30s who have never even sent text message.
- garciasn 5y agoI love how we’re making a class war out of MMS and a variant of MMS that doesn’t require mobile networks to operate. Just send your fucking messages on your mobile devices and be done with it.
- kelnos 5y agoYeah, it's... pretty dumb, IMO. If we want to talk about technical issues, though, it's pretty stark. MMS delivery and message ordering is significantly less reliable than pretty much any OTT service out there. Message size limitations mean videos get recompressed to garbage when you send them. There are basically no add-on features, like reacting with emoji to messages, for example. The disappointing thing is that there's a solution to all of this: RCS[0]. Android supports it, but Apple of course loves their iMessage walled garden and refuses to, even though RCS has end-to-end encryption now. iMessage may be technically superior in some ways, and RCS certainly has its issues, but personally I feel interop is much more important here. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
- throwawayboise 5y agoThis isn't true. SMS was wildly popular in other countries years before it took off here.
- reboot81 5y agoIn Sweden 50% above age 12 have blue bubbles. Out of 50 of my friends and family one keeps using Android.
- eertami 5y agoSweden has a roughly 50/50 split of Android/iOS marketshare. If you have a group of 50 people where 49 are using iOS, it stands to reason that there is probably another group of 50 friends and family where 49 are using Android.
- ksec 5y agoWhy Apple’s iMessage Is Winning in US. The world is made up of nearly 7.8 Billion people. ~4.5B Smartphone users, ~1.1B iOS users. The rest are 95%+ Android ( Both Google and China ) and KaiOS.
- iqanq 5y agoThat's because SMS have always been awfully expensive in the EU. People moved to whatsapp as soon as it came out.
- joconde 5y agoWhen was that? We've had free unlimited SMS/MMS for years in France, even on the cheapest plans at 10 euros/month. Now it's free to/from any EU country too.
- iqanq 5y agoThat is interesting. Before whatsapp showed up, they costed like 25 cents each for a very long time here.
- nicoburns 5y agoHere in the UK I think WhatsApp took off here based on the strength of the group chat. Now people use it (and Facebook Messenger) for everything.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- maratc 5y agoThat was in 2009-2010 when WhatsApp came out. By that time SMS were free and unlimited under most plans in the US but not in other places. WhatsApp, Viber, LINE etc. caught the non-US markets rapidly as a free alternative to an expensive service. These messaging apps didn't do as well in the US, as they had an equally free built-in alternative (SMS). Later, most operators made SMS free everywhere, but it was already too late. 10 years later, we still see the same results.
- jcelerier 5y agoFrance here, around me it's Messenger / Instagram > Telegram ~ WhatsApp > ... A grand total of three of my contacts are on Signal lol
- Hamuko 5y agoI once got texted by a guy coming over to my apartment to install some stuff. Apparently he had an iPhone because I got a blue bubble. Took me a second to figure out why the message looked so weird.
- cplusplusfellow 5y agoDo you have an iPhone, but everyone else in your contacts has some other type?
- Hamuko 5y agoThere's a mix, but everyone would have sent me messages via WhatsApp at that time. Now I'm one of those people that uninstalled WhatsApp and told all of my contacts that I'm moving to Signal. I'm still not getting any iMessage messages and >90% of my incoming SMS are from bots.
- mgh2 5y agoTired of Whatsapp scammers, who can register any temporary phone number without identification confirmation. Find these on crypto, youtube, dating apps, you name it
- pmontra 5y agoItaly: WhatsApp > Telegram > Messenger. Maybe Apple users use iMessage between them but given that they are using WA with everybody else and in group chats I'm not sure it's popular even there.