Hm, I could imagine that for those with smartphones unlimited SMS plans came maybe a bit later in Germany than in the US. When I was shopping for a mobile phon

Hm, I could imagine that for those with smartphones unlimited SMS plans came maybe a bit later in Germany than in the US. When I was shopping for a mobile phone plan for my sister four years ago unlimited SMS were hard to find. Sure, now you get them everywhere, but I don’t think standard smartphone contracts had them four years ago. You had to pay obscenely more (something like double the monthly cost) if you could get unlimited SMS at all. I remember that the high cost of SMS were a real sticking point for my sister. In my experience smartphone contracts in Germany tended to be much cheaper than in the US but you would also get substantially less for your money. That’s still the case today with included unthrottled data volume. So maybe that’s one reason why Whatsapp took off. Another one I can think of is that Germany is less of an iOS monoculture than the US. Android is more widespread, so iMessage frequently gets you no benefit at all.