[hwbehrens]

I think it's a historical artifact -- by the time that iMessage launched, the US was well into the phase of free, unlimited texting, so there was no barrier to "just texting". Since there was also no barrier (in terms of costs, subscriptions, or installation friction) to using iMessage, it was a drop-in upgrade of the user experience for SMS.

In contrast, I still have to pay a fee to send SMS messages to my European relatives, so there's a financial incentive to overcome that initial friction to switch messaging provider.

[bombcar]

More importantly, most Americas do not text anyone outside of the country, and haven't really ever.

So people had no real reason to move off of texting, because it just worked, and Apple's iMessage just looks like texting seamlessly.

[Arrath]

As an American with European and Australian friends, they're the ones who got me into using WhatsApp.

[ghaff]

Yeah, as an American who actually knows a fair number of people overseas, there are probably a literal handful of people who I communicate with on a regular basis there and I use a variety of channels but SMS/iMessage works fine one a day-to-day basis for most folks.

[hpeter]

As an European who lived in multiple countries, I haven't used SMS in 10 years for anything other than 2FA.

[ghaff]

The US probably moved to SMS being basically free (domestically) before Europe did. As a result it seems that the US standardized on SMS (and basically transparently iMessage) because that's what was just there. I never get a Whatsapp message from someone in the US and rarely anything other than SMS/iMessage. I suspect the vast majority of people I know don't have Whatsapp installed. I use it with people I know internationally.

[bombcar]

It’s like Internet Explorer was for downloading Chrome; SMS is for authentication to get your WhatsApp running.

[happyopossum]

> More importantly, most Americas do not text anyone outside of the country, and haven't really ever

As a dual-citizen of Canada and the US, I'd have to say that's massively overgeneralized. Pretty much every Canadian I know regularly texts with Americans (iMessage or not), which means those Americans are texting with people outside of the Country.

[ninjakttty]

You're not refuting his statement. There are massively way more Americans than Canadians.

[bombcar]

And Canada is basically America for the purposes of phone numbers and texting.

What’s Canada’s country code?

[shiroiushi]

No, they're not.

The USA and Canada are really the same country, as far as the telcos are concerned. They're part of the same North American phone system, and have the same +1 prefix. Calls between the countries are all free, and don't carry international charges. You might think they're separate countries, and the governments may agree, but the telecom companies disagree.

[rchaud]

> Calls between the countries are all free, and don't carry international charges.

That depends on your phone plan. The telco charges extra if you don't have a US calling plan add-on. US roaming also costs $12/day.

[GeekyBear]

> by the time that iMessage launched, the US was well into the phase of free, unlimited texting

The iPhone itself launched with unlimited data, but limited text messages.

> keep in mind that AT&T's default rate plans for the iPhone don't include unlimited SMS messages: they include 200 messages per month unless you add an extra-SMS plan. Chatting this way can easily rack up your SMS charges if you're not careful.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/07/iphone-review/8/

When iMessage launched as part of iOS 5, free unlimited SMS was still not a normal thing.

> iMessage is Apple's answer to SMS and MMS—a way to send text and multimedia messages to other iOS device users without relying on a cell carrier. Any kind of text-type message between iOS users can be sent for free in unlimited amounts without chipping away at those overpriced text messages that you pay for through your carrier.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/10/ios-5-reviewed-notif...

[filmgirlcw]

> When iMessage launched as part of iOS 5, free unlimited SMS was still not a normal thing.

It wasn’t universal on all wireless plans, for sure, but by 2011, in the U.S., it was definitely more common that at least for smartphone plans, which were starting to shift into charging for amounts of data usage rather than blanket “unlimited” buckets and were also starting to charge extra fees for tethering (this is also the time that LTE became real and usable in the U.S.), you’d get unlimited or seemingly nearly unlimited messaging plans as part of the fee.

Carriers had been offering large or unlimited text plans for years at this point — my SideKick in high school had unlimited texting as part of the $20 a month fee that T-Mobile charged on top of the minutes plan to operate the software. BlackBerry took advantage of this too with its BIS plans on carriers and the “free texting” lure of BlackBerry via BBM and SMS was a big selling point of those devices for sure.

But the key here is “for smartphone plans.” You still had a lot of non-smartphone users in 2011 and so part of the pitch to get them to spend $500 on a phone that would require a $50 a month plan was unlimited texts. iMessage was a nice carrot here

What I think iMessage did was not only spur carriers to cut the SMS fees even further (again, for smartphone plans), but it was a great additional reason to get people to adopt smartphones. Because the sort of unspoken rule was that if you had a smartphone in the U.S., you had unlimited texting. Most people in the U.S. don’t text people outside the U.S. so unless you have family or friends in other countries or you do a lot of international business, I think SMS was just sort of an accepted default for a lot of people.

So the timing for iMessage in the U.S. was perfect because it used the same default app everyone used, could work on your Mac or iPad or iPod touch too AND it worked internationally with other iPhones. Plus blue bubbles and the many significant technical and security improvements over the old way. But mostly blue bubbles.

But as the other poster said, the lure of BBM and later WhatsApp in the rest of the world was largely that you could use it internationally for free. And the iPhone didn’t get its strong international adoption until after things like WhatsApp had already landed.

The iPhone’s initial carrier restrictions didn’t start to lift until 2011-ish and 2012 so you had Android growing extremely quickly in Europe and Latin America and Asia, where a thing like WhatsApp (which debuted first on iPhone in 2009, it then came to BlackBerry and then in 2010 Android and Symbian) could grow like a weed and have hundreds of millions of users before most people in the U.S. had even heard of it. (I was on CNN and Fox Business in 2014 explaining what WhatsApp was and why Facebook had just spent $20b on it).

So I think timing on iMessage was perfect for U.S. domination (where iPhone marketshare is over 50% but depending on your demographic/age, is probably even higher) but it might have just missed being the defacto tool in the rest of the world.

[danaris]

> But mostly blue bubbles.

This is utterly ahistorical.

No one cared about blue bubbles when iMessage launched, because it hadn't yet become symbolic of "in the ecosystem, can be in group chats without breaking certain features." (In fact, I'm not even sure how many of the user-facing group chat features that break with SMS were even present in 2011...)

The idea that "blue bubbles" were somehow a major driver of iMessage adoption when it first debuted is rank historical revisionism to fit a narrative that isn't even all that universal today.

[mistersquid]

> In contrast, I still have to pay a fee to send SMS messages to my European relatives, so there's a financial incentive to overcome that initial friction to switch messaging provider.

In addition to the financial disincentive for SMS in the EU, communications iMessage to iMessage are E2EE whereas SMS messages are not, even in the context of iMessage to SMS and vice versa.

Also also, Whatsapp’s E2EE is not as reassuring given Meta/Facebook owns Whatsapp.

[freedomben]

> In contrast, I still have to pay a fee to send SMS messages to my European relatives

Oh wow, yeah that's definitely a big reason people would use what's app instead. That's wild to think about and makes no sense. Any idea why that is? Is it regulatory reasons maybe?

[lxgr]

The reason is simply that phone calls across Europe were and are usually not free/included in flat rate plans. Telcos just never found a way to agree on something that makes sense: It's quite common to get unlimited domestic calls, but pay 10-30 cents per minute to a neighboring country.

Nobody (other than businesses) actually pays that; people just ended up using WhatsApp for both calls and texts instead.

So in a way it's the absence of regulation: Data roaming is free within the EU, thanks to a corresponding EU regulation; before that, it wasn't unusual to pay more than EUR 10 per Megabyte (yes, Megabyte, not Gigabyte).

[kj99]

You’d think the EU might want to harmonize regulations around billing calls between countries!

[Denvercoder9]

Regulation 2018/1971 limits the price for outgoing calls within the EEA to 0.19 ct/minute (excl. VAT). Interestingly enough, there doesn't seem to be a limit on incoming calls, though most providers don't charge for incoming calls.

[lxgr]

There's no charge for incoming calls from abroad while at home: All EU countries use "caller pays" billing (unlike the US, which historically has used shared cost for mobile phones).

That's why there are prepaid SIMs without a monthly fee and unlimited incoming calls: The caller's operator pays the called operator a termination charge by the minute.

There is an incoming call charge while roaming, the rationale being that the caller doesn't know where you are and needs predictability in pricing (so the called party pays for the leg from their home country to where they are), but the EU has capped that to zero within the EEA.

[drexlspivey]

Because you don’t get free SMS for other countries, do you have free SMS with Canada in the US?

[gst]

Yes. Most of the plans of the provider that I use in the US (T-Mobile) include free SMS and MMS to any country (also free data roaming in almost any country). I think it's similar for other providers (Verizon and AT&T), but I'm not sure as I'm not familiar with their plans.

[ghusto]

Makes sense. Another thing that occurred to me a while ago was that iPhones have a 61% market share in the U.S.A., whereas Android dominates in Europe (65%). So it could well be that people in Europe with iPhones don't bother trying to use iMessage because it's statistically unlikely the recipient has an iPhone.

[eitally]

Agreed, and additionally, at that time there were no significant SMS alternatives in the US, most people had dumb phones, and no messaging apps came with the sort of supplementary features we have grown accustomed to in the past ten years.

[amatecha]

Yeah, actually until I finally haggled for a better plan maybe ~5 years ago, it used to cost me $0.25 to send an SMS to anyone, even in my own country (Canada)...

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

Canada IMO does take the crown of having the absolute worst telecoms. It’s absolutely astounding to see some of the stuff they pull sometimes. I remember being younger and wanting to unlock a phone from Rogers. They wanted $125 for this act of changing a row in a database

[amatecha]

Yeah, this reminds me, mine and my wife's bills inexplicably went up by like $5 this month, so now I have to investigate as to why our plans that have been locked in at a certain rate for years on end are now suddenly costing us more, without any notification to us. Gotta love it.

[rchaud]

Regulations on that changed in 2016 or so, you can unlock a contract phone without charge through the carrier 90 days after purchase.

[dopa42365]

How much does the cheapest mobile plan that offers "free and unlimited" texting cost in the US? Quick look at t-mobile shows $15/month for unlimited texts.

So much for "free" :)

[nemomarx]

I think they mean free at the point of text, ie not paying per message, not that the plan is free.

Wouldn't 15 be pretty cheap for a phone plan anyway? That's less than Netflix costs now?

[nozzlegear]

Exactly. When my wife and I were younger we would easily send over 3000 sms messages to each other per month; I remember the number because my family saw it on my phone bill and thought it was absurd. Jumping on an unlimited sms plan for an extra $10-15 per month was a no brainer versus paying $0.10 per sms.