TL;DR: Apple dominates the US smartphone market, but EU regulations may offer Android a chance for resurgence by enforcing messaging interoperability and standardizing hardware features.
TL;DR: Apple dominates the US smartphone market, but EU regulations may offer Android a chance for resurgence by enforcing messaging interoperability and standardizing hardware features.
I don’t know about the rest of the world but in the UK text messages used to cost 10p for each one you send. Multimedia messages were like 40p. Really expensive. WhatsApp came about and made both of these free. The rest is history.
Ironically, SMS are generally free these days but nobody obviously uses them. My SMS app is just full of OTP codes being sent to me.
This seems to have happened in most of the world. The US still sticks to SMS because it is free since before chat apps became a thing.
Nowadays in Brazil SMS is also free, but by the point they did that, WhatsApp had already become ubiquitous, and had much better features such as sending location, consistent experience with features over different devices, group chats with moderation, voice messages, free voice calls to any user over the world, etc. No one would willingly go back to SMS.
You’re from Brazil? I just want to say, if English is not your native language you’d have a hard time convincing me it isn’t.
SMS is the same in the UK these days. Free. MMS isn’t though. They still like to scam the older users who know no better.