Most people? But yeah, it's a local thing. Denmark have had free SMS for something like 20 years, at least as an optional add-on to your subscription. So there where never a reason to move to something else. If you frequently used SMS you just paid the small free for a large number of SMS message, or even unlimited. Current subscriptions pretty much all have free SMS.
When smartphones arrived, most just use the built in messing app. On the iPhone that means that you use iMessage, but it's not something you think about. If you took the average Danish iMessage user and asked them, they'd just say it's SMS.
I don't know that I would want Apple to just dominate the messaging market, but iMessage on Android would kill of many of the existing platforms pretty quickly.
I have dozens of group chats with iPhone, Android, and even PC users. We never encounter any of the limitations of SMS, for the same reason we can drive across the country and don’t have to constantly scan for new radio channels. It’s just not a technology that we use.
SMS is the old, WhatsApp/Telegram/Messenger/Signal/Discord/etc is the new.
So I have to replace the native messaging app that's decentralized, well proven, reliable, and pre-installed on every phone that can communicate with anyone in the world for 5 different centralized apps from the app store that may or may not exist next year and also try to move my entire network over?
I use iMessage. It's great, and doesn't get in the way. And as I said it's included on my phone. It also allows me to communicate with anyone and I don't have to think about if the person I'm contacting has it installed or not, it gracefully degrades to SMS when needed. That's a great messaging app!
While I do have browser tabs open for WhatsApp, Google Chat, and GroupMe, as well as the Signal desktop app running, most people I know do not do this, and do most/all of their messaging from their phone.
I get that's not your experience, but it is indeed an experience that exists, and is probably fairly common.
US here. On the old end of "millennial", if that matters.
More than 95% of my personal communication with other humans I know (remote communication, that is, not in-person, obviously) is in WhatsApp. The rest is phone and SMS and that's all older family.
SMS, like email, is mainly for machines to talk to me.
> More than 95% of my personal communication ... is in WhatsApp
This is wild to me. I'm squarely in the middle of the millennial generation and I've never used WhatsApp and I've never known anyone that uses it. Nearly all of my personal communication is through Messages on my iPhone/iPad/Mac.
I would estimate iOS has 99% market share among my social network, including nuclear and extended family. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a green bubble.
Yes, "everyone" was an exaggeration. But whatsapp usage in the US is pretty small. iMessage/sms and fb messenger are the only apps with enough market share to matter.
I won't claim like a sibling that this is "wild", because I think it's not that surprising that different people have different social circles and different group dynamics. But I too am an older US millennial (xennial, if we want to be trendy and overly specific), and my one-on-one communications are almost all on SMS. My group chats are mostly on Signal, WhatsApp, and Slack. I have a few one-on-one chats on Signal and WhatsApp, but the bulk of them are over SMS.
I'm not sure what "locked-in" means here. If something happens to WhatsApp (becomes paid-only, abandoned), you can use Telegram, Viber etc. Maybe the only problem is that you can lose chat history when switching, and that you must make sure all your friends/family migrate to the same service...
> I'm not sure what "locked-in" means here. If something happens to WhatsApp (becomes paid-only, abandoned), you can use Telegram, Viber etc. Maybe the only problem is that you can lose chat history when switching, and that you must make sure all your friends/family migrate to the same service...
And get your contact spread over 4 differents messaging App and consequently have all of them installed.
Since we can switch any time enough folks feel like moving over some of the major group threads to something else, how are we locked in? I can't really think of any time I didn't do nearly all of my communication over one or maybe two channels. In the 1990s, 95+% by landline phone. Then ICQ + Phone. Then SMS. Then WhatsApp.
I also do 95+% of my driving in a single car, and 95+% of my text editing in a single program. 95ish% of my browsing in a single browser. Not locked in to those, either—in all three cases I've switched before without difficulty, and likely will again. I have no idea where the lock-in notion's coming from.
"Locked in" doesn't just mean "I use a single thing for everything".
It means that switching costs are high. With the exception of losing chat history (which I was surprised to find most people don't seem to care about), switching costs between chat platforms are virtually nonexistent.
I dont remember when the last time sending message via SMS. You will not be able to find message app on my android launcher because I hide it, and many people in my circle never really open it other than to read spam message from operator.
So yeah most of the time whatsapp and telegram 100% of my circle. SMS is a thing from the past, I guess the gen z here don't even understand what's SMS.
That's a bit of an overstatement and really depend on who you ask. I'd say that no-one uses WhatsApp. I know exactly two people who uses WhatsApp, but that also not representative of their actual marketshare.
I see that it’s more limited to Western Europe but it really is dominant in a lot of markets.
But that’s not really the point, the point is that also in the markets where the network effect causes the majority of people to use Telegram, Viber or Facebook Messenger, they’re mostly not using SMS, because even if it is free, a messenger service is better.
I tried to go back to a non-smart phone, but it was impossible due to not having whatsapp. That might be a 'local' thing though, not sure.
Anyway, they should just release imessage for android; that would piss off meta too, which is a win in my book ;)