It's not iPhone adoption: lots of countries have very high iPhone adoption, but don't use iMessage. The key is SMS: no one outside North America uses it any mo

It's not iPhone adoption: lots of countries have very high iPhone adoption, but don't use iMessage. The key is SMS: no one outside North America uses it any more; it's just like fax machines. It might still be used by businesses to send you package delivery notices, for instance, but that's about it. No one uses it to talk to their friends and family. Here in Japan, iPhone adoption is at least as high as in the US, but absolutely no one uses SMS for chatting; they use LINE messenger instead. From what I've read elsewhere, the main reason was SMS charges: many years ago, it cost money to send SMS texts in most countries, while in North America the telecom companies were faster at offering free texting (or at least flat-rate). So elsewhere, various chat apps arose and caught on: LINE in Japan, WeChat in China, KakaoTalk in Korea, WhatsApp elsewhere. Now that everyone is used to these services and they've become so popular to the point where they're basically mandatory to participate in society, why would anyone want to go back to SMS? The only problem with the messaging apps is that they're all separate from each other so they're silos, but unless you have a lot of friends spread across different countries, that's not an issue. And these apps don't disciminate based on which phone you own.