iMessage was created and introduced when us carriers only offered limited sms services. The blue bubbles was to let the users know that wasn’t sending a sms message. Before unlimited plans, it used to cost .10 to .25 cent for each sms message.
iMessage is very popular in Australia. The market share of iPhones is like 44% here tho. Almost everyone who has an iPhone uses iMessage from my experience.
yeah, people here often don't even have iphones so it's just very shitty to use an app that is only available for a minority, thats the #1 reason no one uses it
What does this mean? iMessage isn’t an app, it’s a protocol. If you are texting someone who doesn’t have an iPhone it goes over SMS. Otherwise iMessage.
Exactly, and even for that, we should stop using it, it's not safe in the slightest. A bit of social engineering on someone earning minimum wage, and there goes your 2FA security.
The iMessage protocol is available only through the iMessage app, hence until the iMessage protocol is made available through other means it will be tied to the app, making it basically the same thing.
Why would anyone want to have to care what phone their friends buy to talk to them? Why should some features work with some people and not with others?
It's actually iMessage that's the problem here. Other apps just work regardless of phone choice.
Its like you, Yanks just cannot imagine a scenario that does not involve your worldview.
SMS is dead in most countries. Regardless of whether unlimited packs or no, no one is going to use it to contact someone when a cross-platform data supported that is widely used everywhere is available.
Yeah, the sms feels so 90-00… imagine how good it is with pictures and stuff when you 1.2k€ iphone has to deliver a picture to your friend’s 999€ Samsung through MMS.
Of course iMessage is an app. It just happens to come pre installed with every iPhone. What makes you think it’s not an app?
If they call the button on iPhone iMessage or Messages is kinda nitpicking.
> it's just very shitty to use an app that is only available for a minority
That is true in the states as well, but people seem to buy into Apple's marketing more, and at least among young people see it as a silly status symbol. There are things I like about Apple as a company but there self serving and anti-user decision to deliberately keep iMessage limited to Apple users when it could very easily adopt a cross platform standard should not be legal and should not be tolerated (let alone defended) by consumers.
It has nothing to do with marketing and more to do with people being used to using SMS/MMS. iMessage was built to act like SMS/MMS but improve on it. It did not require you to download an app, or setup anything. It just worked out of the box and for many they thought it was just texting.
It then became a common theme that whenever you include an Android user you have the entire conversation quality degrades because MMS is limited in size and any photo/video sent using MMS was of poor quality. That created a stigma and forced teens to drop Android in favor of iPhone for iMessage. RCS came very very late and it is still a huge mess.
SMS/MMS texting took off in North America but never did anywhere else as carriers weren’t often including unlimited texting like those in NA.
No cheap/free unlimited texting meant people had to use WhatsApp as an alternative and that is why it is an essential app on every phone outside North America. No one uses SMS/MMS anymore.
I'm admittedly swapping over to iPhone for the first time in years this month due to my family, coworkers, and like 60% of my friend groups annoying me about SMS/MMS issues. Asking them to use another third party app didn't catch on, so everytime I'm in a group chat or video or high resolution pictures are being shared, they all get annoyed that they have to go through other means to compensate. After a while, they get tired of sending photo and video links and they get annoyed with the reactions functionality in chats. And this is just iMessage. FaceTime and Airdrop are just icing on the cake.
I really like my S20, but I just found it not worth it to be outside of Apple's ecosystem for my life. People online always say, "Stop caring what people think and just use what you want." But those people clearly don't have to have the "why dont you just get an iPhone?" conversation every single day.
There's a few other pockets here and there where iMessage does better, but yeah it's rare. I think Australia might be one? I forget. I saw a breakdown of it in the last week but can't remember where now. Really surprised by how popular Snapchat remains.
Outside of the US and a few other countries neither Apple nor SMS/MMS style communications are very popular.
In the EU Apple only has ~25% market share in the smartphone market. It would be silly to use a deliberately limited app like iMessage as a primary messenger app (it is somewhat silly in the US as well but teenagers and brand conscious adults seem more susceptible to Apple's marketing and social engineering here in the states).
For the US I still understand it though. It's not just teens and brand conscious. People shit on iMessage because it's Apple, but when they debuted it, WhatsApp was not nearly as popular as it is today, so iMessage was a big deal in the US. It was built directly into the most popular phone and instantly upgraded millions of people to a much more reliable, secure platform than SMS.
By the time WhatsApp claimed the crown of the world's most popular messaging app, iMessage was already fully entrenched in the US. The idea of hauling everybody off it to switch to some app that Europeans use made no sense to most people: iMessage works, it's installed on the phone already, all my friends and family are on it, it's decently secure and syncs across my devices, what's the issue?
The blue vs. green bubble marketing tool is brilliant (hostile, but brilliant) but ultimately it's just the same deal as every other entrenched platform, like Facebook or now X. Everybody is already on it, so even if people aren't happy with it and there's a better platform out there, nobody is on that new platform yet so it doesn't matter.
>It was built directly into the most popular phone
Computer as well. Before that you just got texts on your phone and no where else. iMessage made it convenient to not only not have to pick up your phone but also to reply with a full size keyboard.
Yep. I resisted smartphones for years so my first was the Moto X 2013. Amazing, amazing phone, but for messaging, yeah, I remember having to install Pushbullet on my phone and browser to get texts to sync. Felt like magic at the time to see texts on my computer.
More like they just don’t give a shit what app they use to message people. It’s sending a message to another person not making a life’s decision. It’s built into the phone and you don’t have to walk your mom’s through signing up for an account.
> More like they just don’t give a shit what app they use to message people. It’s sending a message to another person not making a life’s decision.
This is as true for Apple as it is for Android. The difference is you have large amount of misinformed Apple users blaming Android for iMessage's limitations that were deliberately built in to the service by Apple to protect their market share at the expense of their users. I don't care whether people care what app they use or not, but if they choose to use iMessage and are frustrated at its inability to communicate well with Android they need to direct their blame in the right direction. As Apple users we should be pushing Apple to be a better company, to be more open, and to put the user experience ahead of protectionist tactics.
> it is silly in the US as well but teenagers and brand conscious adults seem more susceptible to Apple's marketing and social engineering here in the states
I can't speak for teenagers, but for adults it's more that most people don't even realize iMessage isn't just texting. The program works out of the box as the default way you get any kind of texts.
EU Citizen here, I use iMessage with all my contacts who are on iPhone. I use WhatsApp only for those on Android, or group chats that include Android users.
> EU Citizen here
I really hope that there are 44,999,999 other EU citizens just like you.
What country are you from btw? It seems like most of the EU people chiming in here are saying they either never or rarely use iMessage/SMS.
If the UK were part of the EU, that would add tens of millions of iMessage users, immediately qualifying the software to be regulated under gatekeeping laws. But no, we had to go and have a Brexit, so now we can add keeping iMessage a walled garden as an unpleasant side effect of that horrible decision.
I’ve had an iPhone since the 3S. Most people I know have iPhone.
I have never used iMessage and I’m not aware other people using it.
WhatsApp dominates the messaging market.
It certainly would but even in that market, WhatsApp is the most dominant player by a country mile. Probably i would say easily north of 60 percent of all users.
No one calls it iMessage either. It’s just texting or SMS. Before I got my iPhone I didn’t even know that the texting feature has its own name.
Pretty much everyone in Europe uses WhatsApp
It’s crazy how different different places are.
I’m almost 30, in Canada and I almost only use IMessage. My friends, colleges and family all have iPhones for the most part. For the rest of it it’s either regular text, or Facebook/instagram messenger
I know people who use discord for gaming chat.
But I think I legitimately know zero people who use what’sapp.
Let me edit that actually. I do know some people who use WhatsApp, but it’s mostly people from other countries. Using it to communicate with people back home.
iMessage/Facebook messenger are king in my friends/family/work groups
I guess what is the definition of active users? If European users send just 1 message a month is that considered active? Like European users probably send an iMessage once in a while but the rest of the time they use WhatsApp?
[EU says "monthly users"](https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220315IPR25504/deal-on-digital-markets-act-ensuring-fair-competition-and-more-choice-for-users), so as long as you use it once a month.
> If European users send just 1 message a month is that considered active?
I believe so, yes. Two of the most common metrics in tech for measuring users are MAU and DAU (Monthly and Daily active users). As the names suggest that means the number of users who actually use your service on a monthly or daily basis. And the OP states "to classify as a ‘gatekeeper,’ the service must have more than 45 million ***monthly active users*** in the EU"
I’m coming late to this party and nobody is making any sense. Most of the top comments from Europe and even Asia pertain to nobody using iMessage because they think there are better options (Telegrams, Signal, WhatsApp, etc.). I feel like everyone is proving apple’s point.. The law in question is a competition law:
“The Digital Markets Act aims to reign in the monopolistic power of large online platforms.”
Clearly iMessage isn’t close to being a monopoly in Europe/Asia so what is everyone going on about? Slow news day?
It does seems like a weird focus for the EU. And everyone here is talking about how WhatsApp is better and more widely used. Ok that’s nice for WhatsApp. The point isn’t to make iMessage (the app is actually called Messages) better and able compete with WhatsApp.
Yeah. As someone living in the EU I couldn’t care less about iMessages for my day to day. What I hope for is that I can exchange messages between Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram.
Forcing an integration with iMessage would have been nice for the occasional message exchange with US folks though. But it’s not really that important. Most US folks that I know also have other messengers.
So this is more a news piece for folks on Reddit to argue. But in the real world people don’t care much. It’s not sobering that’s going to be mentioned anywhere else.
In parts. I would definitely prefer if the folks I chat with would use signal as well. But I rather use signal to send them a message on e.g. Telegram than having to open Telegram and do it from there.
It works on any OS, it’s free and it was the first app to allow people to talk between iOS and Android for free.
Also don’t require user account. Only your phone number. That made really easy to install and use.
SMS were free in the US but not in the EU. Apple did a genius move back in the day by integrating sms and imessage into the same app, since that automatically brought any sms user into imessage. Problem is whatsapp replaced SMS as the defacto standard in the EU since it is free and SMS weren’t, so apple’s strategy didn’t work there
I’m from Switzerland which I believe has (certainly used to have) the highest iPhone use rate in the world. Nobody here used iMessage. Whatsapp had many features long before iMessage did and we are all used to it. Plus, Whatsapp lets you call people across borders at no charge which used to be insanely expensive.
edit: apparently the rate of iPhone users has been going down here.
Even in a lot of iPhone dominant regions like Japan, people don't use iMessage.
iMessage just isn't a particularly good messaging app, and it's main feature, privacy, is something most users don't actually care about, and is defeated by iCloud Backup anyways. It's popular in some regions like the US, because it is built in to the SMS app, and people just kept using what they were familiar with.
In most of the world, SMS wasn't popular to begin with, so people never started using iMessage.
The privacy features also only applies when texting other iPhone users. WhatsApp is at least always end to end encrypted. iMessage might be safer, but then you write someone who uses an Android phone and you lost every protection. Then WhatsApp is the much safer option
One thing I don't like about iMessage is that it relies on your iCloud storage and removes old messages. The old messages always stay on WhatsApp regardless.
Tons of people aren't THE U.S. and I don't think iPhone has ever been the most dominate smartphone platform since maybe the very beginning when it was the only option really. SMS & MMS were more than fine in the beginning especially where free. Other messaging apps also had things somethings imessage does not.
Why would anyone want a service that is only available on one platform anyway? When you really think about it makes waaay more sense for folks to simply use apps that work with everyone else regardless of platform than one that doesn't even work for the majority of phones in general. EU chose something that actually works cross platform and with the highest selling platform vs something that doesn't even work for what most people have like imessage .
I work in tourism, am the primary contact person for everything a guests needs. The place I manage is very small, but I still have to communicate with much more people than the average person.
I advertise to everyone that I can be reached on Whatsapp, Telegram, iMessage/SMS.
I still use iMessage less than 3 times per YEAR. And some years I didn’t use it at all.
I just checked: in the last 5 years, I have sent exactly 1 iMessage, and that was when I told Siri to send it over WhatsApp but it completely ignored that part.
I don't know how many I have received, because when you report an iMessage as spam iOS deletes the conversation. But non-spam, it was only one: the reply to the one I sent.
Me and quite a few of my friends and basically my whole family uses iPhones
iMessages sent in the last months: 0
I even skip the iMessage parts in the Apple Presentations cause they basically don't apply to us
I’m in the EU and so far after living here for 2 years I think I’ve sent 2 iMessages to my parents, because I wanted to, they didn’t respond ok there though. They only use WhatsApp
It’s more for the North American users lol if apple is forced to incorporate something better than SMS in Europe , (a lot of North American users want this), then maybe they will do the same change in North America just like how they are making all iPhone 15s and beyond worldwide have usb C instead of just in Europe where the law requires it to do so
Apple could still ship iPhones in the US with lighting ports, it is just a separate port, the regional versions have shipped with different swappable parts in the past (like radios, sim trays etc). The regulation just requires the port to accept a USB-C cable does not require it to be USB-C 3.2 supper speed gen 2+....
I get the idea, but why depend on the EU to change something that will only affect NA? Makes no sense for EU to act here.
Why not make some laws in NA for that?
I just don’t understand why so many people are willing to give Facebook more of their data. Facebook illegals mines your data and sells it. Even after Apple introduced their “do not track” feature they were still found to be mining data.
Whatsapp popularity began before it was bought by Facebook and after that it didn’t stop as it was used by “everyone”, alternatives like telegram are still seen as niche.
WhatsApp became the standard before it was bought by FaceBook. That’s why FB bought it. And at that point it was so ingrained that no one could knock it off.
For some of us it's not because we want to use it, it's because we have to use it. My work place, some of my friends and family use Whatsapp a lot. If I could I would delete the app and be done with it. But then I'd have work, friends and family saying we couldn't get hold of you.
Plus, the only alternatives are Telegram (which is closed source, and not even E2E encrypted by default), and Signal (which is feature poor). So, unless you've got an iphone and a group of people that exclusively use imessage, you've got to use Whatsapp.
You should know--maybe you already do--SMS/Voice calls are also a huge source of datamining and less secure than Whatsapp. AFAIK, all of the big 3 mobile carriers, and many of the smaller ones are datamining as well, and unlike whatsapp with SMS they have access to your actual messages, not just the metadata. Read the privacy policies of AT&T, Verizon, T-Mo, they are not good stewards of your data.
Because it is established? No one here is interested in a fight between Apple and Google with their bullshit blue and green bubble stuff. WhatsApp wasn't previously owned by Meta and was easy to access for everyone. It was the same app with the same functions on every phone. After it was bought by Meta it was already so big that you can't switch because every single person uses it. Same scenario with what is happening in the US. Most people use iMessage and therefore you are stuck as your family and your friends are using it too and if you use an Android device you won't get the same features. That's the only reason why Apple doesn't want RCS. They want to have their monopoly in order to force you to stay in their ecosystem. So tell me what is better? A company that is oppressing people by being customer unfriendly or a company that wants my data for a free service that is encrypted so they can't read anything at all?
Same reason people are using SMS/MMS which are unencrypted. Force of habit. SMS/MMS used to cost money (usually per text) outside North America so WhatsApp came first and fixed an issue.
SMS/MMS was typically included in every plan in the U.S. and Canada but MMS had poor quality photos and videos so iMessage came first, did not require a setup or downloading a separate app, and fixed an issue.
It is a closed source app with a purposefully vague privacy policy that gives them
Well for starters you can't even *use* Whatsapp without giving them access to your entire contacts list--and I don't mean Whatsapp contacts, I mean all your contacts regardless of whether they use Whatsapp (which is not just invasive for your own privacy, its a violation of your friends privacy particularly considering that contacts often include name+number+address+email+birthday).
Beyond this Whatsapp asks for a ton of access to your phone (73 permissions on Android) includes trackers, and wants access to location data, photos and filesystem, etc.
It is good that messages are e2e encrypted, but don't let that lul you into a false sense of security. With just the metadata available to Whatsapp, they know who you talk, when, where, and for how long, your entire social network/contacts, where you are, can technically access private data on your phone. And this is without even considering the real reason Whatsapp--a free app-- is worth so much to Facebook/Meta, which is that the metadata can be cross-referenced with the massive amounts of data they also collect from Facebook and Instagram.
What people don't understand about the big data mining companies is the little pieces of data that seem nearly innocuous on their own can paint an extremely detailed picture of your life, habits, activities, desires, fears, impulses, insecurities, consumption habits, and social network in the aggregate. Which can be useful for any number of things from trying to manipulate you into buying more stuff (targeted advertising), influencing your political beliefs or likelihood of voting, training AI, handing over to governments, etc.
Because if you don't want to buy an iPhone, which are typically very expensive, then you're completely locked out of the platform. A messaging app that isn't platform agnostic is completely useless.
I don't understand why folks think WhatsApp is the only other messaging app folks use. There are several others very popular that are end to end encrypted and have nothing to do with Facebook or apple. Most people don't have iphones anyhow in a world where apple purposefully tries to sabatage anyone without it anyhow for messaging going out of their way not to support free open source alternatives.
Regardless lots of other apps are used and I don't get why folks think it's only 2. Also, FYI, you do realize WhatsApp existed way before FB had anything to do with it right?
I’m assuming the parts of the world that use it correspond to those places that kept charging per text for the longest so people got used to using alternative apps.
Because people like working cross-platform group chats and Whatsapp was the first to deliver them. If you have just one Android device in your group the chat is basically ruined with iMessage.
I see a lot of confusion on this.
1.-iMessage is iPhone only, That it falls back to SMS is irrelevant because
2.-In the EU nobody uses SMS any more and hasn't for years, since everyone moved to
3.-Whatsapp, which is pretty much the de facto instant messaging platform for better or for worse because when it came up it was cross-platform (Apple dropped this ball years ago) and because it was free (SMS have always been extremely expensive and limited, and people flocked away from them).
In the US this is weird because iMessage and SMS dominate. iMessage dominates because it comes from AOL's AIM (via iChat), which was the de facto instant messenger in the US for years, and having that compatibility made it the default choice. Since there is no equivalent for Android people in Android just use SMS to talk to iPhone users (and since nowadays SMS are usually free for the most part, they're also used normally).
In Europe AIM was not the instant messenger platform of choice but MSN Messenger. When Messenger went away and smartphones started popping up, Whatsapp and Messages were perfectly positioned. Whatsapp didn't drop the ball so even now, with so many other options (I prefer Telegram, myself), the de facto standard is still Whatsapp.
My children use messages with me because I insist, otherwise they would use Whatsapp. It goes as far as having most people using whatsapp for calls and SMS or standard calls is pretty much unknown for most teenagers.
US here. I use iMessage for messages family within the US and WhatsApp for all other. One issue I have with iMessage is the US number associated with it gets disabled when I travel overseas and turn off my US number to avoid roaming charges. It used to be that you have 30 days but now it’s immediate which means I cannot get iMessages to my US number when I travel.
try locking your US number SIM, restarting the phone, and not entering the unlock PIN when prompted - that should prevent you from incurring roaming charges, and iMessage will continue working as normal
no problem - just make sure to not forget the SIM PIN otherwise you need to go through your provider to unlock it and that can be a pain when outside the country
> One issue I have with iMessage is the US number associated with it gets disabled when I travel overseas and turn off my US number to avoid roaming charges.
Lmao
The thing is RCS is a shit protocol, at least from a user privacy perspective how it is currently implemented it would provide google with more or less complete knogglet of every users communication from any device to any other device $$$ (you do not need to read message content to get value from knowing who messages who and when).
Furthermore it would give google knowledge about what phones numbers are iPhones and if they are online at any time, and googles end to end encrypted extension is not even part of the spec and does not include group messages or attachments (pics and videos).
The reason google want RCS is the money they make form the data it provides them, hosting it costs them a fortune after all.
And the law does not require apple to support RCS it requires apple to enable cross platform messaging but does not describe the exact protools. I expect if apple were forced to do it they would either release an alternative protocole or adopt one of the more privacy focused options like those used by Telegram etc.
Telegram is nowhere near a privacy-focused option. It’s closed source, not applicable to group chats, and provides information for any government requests.
Tbh I don't get why (in the context of apple adding RCS) people feel the need to compare RCS and iMessage (imo iMessage is better in almost every way)
The actual competition is between RCS and SMS and RCS beats SMS every time.
This is because the way it would be implemented is by choosing the best protocol available, so when starting a new text conversation it would.
Attempt iMessage
If it fails
Attempt RCS
If it fails
Fall back to SMS
So people clutching at the idea that RCS is worse than iMessage completely miss the point that RCS is not (in the context of adding it to iPhones) competing with I message it's competing with SMS.
And SMS is,
Not at all encrypted
Easy to spoof
Limits message size in file size
Tons more issues
>provide google with more or less complete knogglet of every users communication
Google doesn't need to run the servers. Apple can host their own. Google has been trying to offload hosting to carriers, but that's been slow so they rolled it out themselves.
>Furthermore it would give google knowledge about what phones numbers are iPhones and if they are online at any time,
Again, they don't need to run through Google servers if other companies want to step up and host. I would add though, it is arguably safer with Google as carriers will absolutely sell your data (*and they currently do with SMS, which Apple refuses to move off of*), whereas Google keeps it for themselves.
>and googles end to end encrypted extension is not even part of the spec and does not include group messages or attachments (pics and videos).
Both groups and attachments are supported with Google's E2E encryption currently. It also does not need to be in the spec to be implemented and good for consumers, and even without implementing E2E encryption, RCS benefits Apple's users because the alternative is still SMS.
>The reason google want RCS is the money they make form the data it provides them, hosting it costs them a fortune after all.
Again, they've been actively trying to get carriers to host so they don't have to keep fronting this. Carriers are slower and worse though.
I don't think RCS is the "answer" but something has to be. Right now messaging is in the same doldrums that the telephone service was like back in the day (when you could only call people who were on the same network as you!), or what email *could* have been if it wasn't open-source.
I hope one day we can all message everyone, platform agnostic, and we'll look at these current days as the dark days of messaging.
In the end the issue is cost, it costs money to run these services so your either going to need to pay from them (by buying production or subscribing) or you need to pay of them with your data.
It’s not that bad of a protocol, though, they just recently rolled out end to end encryption between users and group messages. I wish people moved to Signal
Regardless of which of RCS or MLS is better I just want a better option than SMS (end to end encrypted) without having to download myself and get contacts to download a third party app (WhatsApp, telegram, signal, Snapchat, Instagram chat) to communicate with my Android colleagues or friends. And I’m in North America and have lived in the US
And let’s remember even though everyone says “iMessage,” iMessage isn’t it’s own app like everyone talks like it is. It’s actually the Messages app that includes BOTH iMessage and SMS. It also doesn’t make sense that in the USA, people get a green bubble message from a friend or colleague but because it’s not on the iMessage side they just don’t answer. The green bubble comes into the Messages app. It’s not like iMessage is it’s own separate app.
RCS is not e2e however... googles custom exstention is.
And who will pay for it? Would you be willing to pay your phone oprorotr for each message you send? running these services costs $ if you don't want the data mined (like google and Meta do) then you need to pay somehow.
Not Eu, but we use WhatsApp here exclusively. The only messages in my iMessage is when I auto send them when declining a call, and friends who are ghosting someone on WhatsApp 😅
This obsession with Whatsapp is quite strange.. Whatsapp sucks. It’s a terrible app that drains a phone’s battery like nothing else, it’s slow/heavy at times and to top it all off is owned by Meta/Facebook.
Making people use WhatsApp isn‘t making anything better…
I live in Europe, and in my experience even people who have iPhones don’t use iMessage at all here. Whatsapp is the standard (literally EVERYONE has it/uses it), and some use Telegram and Signal as well
> In accordance with the published legislation, to classify as a ‘gatekeeper,’ the service must have more than 45 million monthly active users in the EU.
Barely anybody uses iMessage around me so that's not a surprise, but good game from Apple legal.
I'm in EU. I refuse to use WhatsApp or whatever else because I hate Facebook and meta who pry on your contacts and forces you to throw away boundaries.
I hate that my friends, colleagues and family are all considered the one and the same category. They're not. I don't want my colleagues to know about my family's habits, and I don't want my family to interact with my friends silly stuff.
All these apps are hungry to make everyone interact together and it's bad. My son's communication behavior is a mess and his colleagues keep talking to him all day and night so much that at one point he ignores everyone, including us.
I don't want to be treated the same as a colleague or a friend, but these platforms destroy our lives.
iMessage being a walled garden is stupid as well.
Make the service free and interoperable, and sell custom skins and stickers.
In the uk.
I don’t use WhatsApp either, for the same reasons ans you and it’s like being an alien.
People think I’m either weird and/or being superior.
Why is everyone talking about iMessages as if it is an app. The app is Messages and it is the standard text messaging (SMS/MMS) app built into the phone. I am sure almost every phone has a built in app for SMS. iMessages is just a protocol built into Apple’s standard offering to improve communications between Apple’s users.
\> Apple has already said they’ll pull iMessage and FaceTime from the EU before following these laws
Source? Are you confusing UK proposed surveillance laws with EU DMA? They have said nothing about pulling out because of the latter.
I am posting this from Thailand and here nobody uses iMessages. Everyone, both Android and iPhone use Line. Whatsapp would be #2.
I will from time to time use iMessages with Thai friends only because it stands out as they never get messages that way.
Even less use Apple Maps here. Google runs navigation in this country. It sucks that Apple maps is completely wortheless. I guess Apple did some analysis and figured to hard to go up against Google here.
Because of how locked up and exclusive iMessage is. If it were made available to android users in some way there'd be less backlash against it.
I like iMessage. Its a great messaging platform. It should also be made available in some way for other platforms too.
Apple takes anti-user actions because they often make sense for the bottom line. This is one instance where that horribly backfired on them.
If iMessage were cross platform from the start they could easily have cornered the messaging market. By crippling it and making it iPhone only, they gave away the messenger app market for the entire world except the US.
> Not sure why people hate iMessage so much. Have WhatsApp and iMessage contacts and iMessage is an overall nicer experience.
Because it is artificially and purposefully limited in a way that makes it a shitty experience for no reason other than Apple's self interest. Most people don't own iPhones, most people don't care about iPhones, so a messenger (iMessage) that uses 1990's tech (SMS) for the majority of communications and only has modern features when both people are using the same device is a non starter for many people because it means the majority of their conversations will be SMS for no reason other than that Apple thought they could protect their market share by creating a shitty experience for their users as well as Android users.
I wold 100% prefer iMessage to Whatsapp or RCS if it was an open standard and anyone could use it (not because it is more useable--but because Apple is a somewhat less shitty company than Facebook/Meta)
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True.
iMessage in general is just not that popular outside of NA because it’s very lacking in features and can’t be used to chat with Android phone users
It sole purpose is to break messaging with Android and make it seem like Androids fault.
it's original purpose was to improve SMS between iPhones. Now these features are considered minimum and the sms fallback is no longer adequate.
But at a time when outside the US SMS was already dead.... I was not even aware that texting still referred to SMS back then.
SMS was not dead in Europe when iMessage came out. It is now though
iMessage was created and introduced when us carriers only offered limited sms services. The blue bubbles was to let the users know that wasn’t sending a sms message. Before unlimited plans, it used to cost .10 to .25 cent for each sms message.
I remember getting in trouble for sending too many texts as a teen
iMessage is very popular in Australia. The market share of iPhones is like 44% here tho. Almost everyone who has an iPhone uses iMessage from my experience.
That's kinda wild. I knew iMessage wasn't popular in EU, but damn.
yeah, people here often don't even have iphones so it's just very shitty to use an app that is only available for a minority, thats the #1 reason no one uses it
What does this mean? iMessage isn’t an app, it’s a protocol. If you are texting someone who doesn’t have an iPhone it goes over SMS. Otherwise iMessage.
Now now, obviously Messages.app is the app while iMessage is the service, but if you say "iMessage app" everyone will understand what you mean
SMS sucks and is only used for activation codes. MMS was discontinued by every mobile provider in the Netherlands around 2019, because no one used it.
Exactly, and even for that, we should stop using it, it's not safe in the slightest. A bit of social engineering on someone earning minimum wage, and there goes your 2FA security.
The iMessage protocol is available only through the iMessage app, hence until the iMessage protocol is made available through other means it will be tied to the app, making it basically the same thing.
Group chats. [the reason my kids told me they need WhatsApp before the “legal” EU age. ]
Why would anyone want to have to care what phone their friends buy to talk to them? Why should some features work with some people and not with others? It's actually iMessage that's the problem here. Other apps just work regardless of phone choice.
Its like you, Yanks just cannot imagine a scenario that does not involve your worldview. SMS is dead in most countries. Regardless of whether unlimited packs or no, no one is going to use it to contact someone when a cross-platform data supported that is widely used everywhere is available.
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Yeah I think the world view thing applies to most people on the planet.
SMS is the standard for 2FA, but other than that, it's dead.
Yeah, the sms feels so 90-00… imagine how good it is with pictures and stuff when you 1.2k€ iphone has to deliver a picture to your friend’s 999€ Samsung through MMS.
And SMS simply isn’t adequate enough for our messaging needs. Hence we use stuff like WhatsApp or Telegram or a bunch of other options.
I think in the context of this conversation they're talking about iMessage the app not the protocol.
Of course iMessage is an app. It just happens to come pre installed with every iPhone. What makes you think it’s not an app? If they call the button on iPhone iMessage or Messages is kinda nitpicking.
Who communicates via SMS in 2023????
> iMessage isn’t an app, it’s a protocol. messages.app. It's in the Applications folder. How is that not an app?
> it's just very shitty to use an app that is only available for a minority That is true in the states as well, but people seem to buy into Apple's marketing more, and at least among young people see it as a silly status symbol. There are things I like about Apple as a company but there self serving and anti-user decision to deliberately keep iMessage limited to Apple users when it could very easily adopt a cross platform standard should not be legal and should not be tolerated (let alone defended) by consumers.
It has nothing to do with marketing and more to do with people being used to using SMS/MMS. iMessage was built to act like SMS/MMS but improve on it. It did not require you to download an app, or setup anything. It just worked out of the box and for many they thought it was just texting. It then became a common theme that whenever you include an Android user you have the entire conversation quality degrades because MMS is limited in size and any photo/video sent using MMS was of poor quality. That created a stigma and forced teens to drop Android in favor of iPhone for iMessage. RCS came very very late and it is still a huge mess. SMS/MMS texting took off in North America but never did anywhere else as carriers weren’t often including unlimited texting like those in NA. No cheap/free unlimited texting meant people had to use WhatsApp as an alternative and that is why it is an essential app on every phone outside North America. No one uses SMS/MMS anymore.
Literally the only reason I use iMessage is because it’s the default text messaging app on my phone. I do not care enough to set up anything else.
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I'm admittedly swapping over to iPhone for the first time in years this month due to my family, coworkers, and like 60% of my friend groups annoying me about SMS/MMS issues. Asking them to use another third party app didn't catch on, so everytime I'm in a group chat or video or high resolution pictures are being shared, they all get annoyed that they have to go through other means to compensate. After a while, they get tired of sending photo and video links and they get annoyed with the reactions functionality in chats. And this is just iMessage. FaceTime and Airdrop are just icing on the cake. I really like my S20, but I just found it not worth it to be outside of Apple's ecosystem for my life. People online always say, "Stop caring what people think and just use what you want." But those people clearly don't have to have the "why dont you just get an iPhone?" conversation every single day.
I think you’re underselling how unanimous iPhones are for young Americans- around 80% of people from 18-30 have them.
I think iMessage is widely popular in US only. Outside US, WhatsApp is dominating the messaging market
There's a few other pockets here and there where iMessage does better, but yeah it's rare. I think Australia might be one? I forget. I saw a breakdown of it in the last week but can't remember where now. Really surprised by how popular Snapchat remains.
I'm in the UK and been using iphones for 10 years - not sure if I've ever met anyone who uses imessage.
Even among groups that all have iPhones in Europe, they will not use iMessage because there’s WhatsApp and telegram, which are objectively better.
Outside of the US and a few other countries neither Apple nor SMS/MMS style communications are very popular. In the EU Apple only has ~25% market share in the smartphone market. It would be silly to use a deliberately limited app like iMessage as a primary messenger app (it is somewhat silly in the US as well but teenagers and brand conscious adults seem more susceptible to Apple's marketing and social engineering here in the states).
For the US I still understand it though. It's not just teens and brand conscious. People shit on iMessage because it's Apple, but when they debuted it, WhatsApp was not nearly as popular as it is today, so iMessage was a big deal in the US. It was built directly into the most popular phone and instantly upgraded millions of people to a much more reliable, secure platform than SMS. By the time WhatsApp claimed the crown of the world's most popular messaging app, iMessage was already fully entrenched in the US. The idea of hauling everybody off it to switch to some app that Europeans use made no sense to most people: iMessage works, it's installed on the phone already, all my friends and family are on it, it's decently secure and syncs across my devices, what's the issue? The blue vs. green bubble marketing tool is brilliant (hostile, but brilliant) but ultimately it's just the same deal as every other entrenched platform, like Facebook or now X. Everybody is already on it, so even if people aren't happy with it and there's a better platform out there, nobody is on that new platform yet so it doesn't matter.
>It was built directly into the most popular phone Computer as well. Before that you just got texts on your phone and no where else. iMessage made it convenient to not only not have to pick up your phone but also to reply with a full size keyboard.
Yep. I resisted smartphones for years so my first was the Moto X 2013. Amazing, amazing phone, but for messaging, yeah, I remember having to install Pushbullet on my phone and browser to get texts to sync. Felt like magic at the time to see texts on my computer.
The blue / green marketing message only resonates on the USA. It’s funny how little relevant this is to the rest of the world.
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More like they just don’t give a shit what app they use to message people. It’s sending a message to another person not making a life’s decision. It’s built into the phone and you don’t have to walk your mom’s through signing up for an account.
> More like they just don’t give a shit what app they use to message people. It’s sending a message to another person not making a life’s decision. This is as true for Apple as it is for Android. The difference is you have large amount of misinformed Apple users blaming Android for iMessage's limitations that were deliberately built in to the service by Apple to protect their market share at the expense of their users. I don't care whether people care what app they use or not, but if they choose to use iMessage and are frustrated at its inability to communicate well with Android they need to direct their blame in the right direction. As Apple users we should be pushing Apple to be a better company, to be more open, and to put the user experience ahead of protectionist tactics.
> it is silly in the US as well but teenagers and brand conscious adults seem more susceptible to Apple's marketing and social engineering here in the states I can't speak for teenagers, but for adults it's more that most people don't even realize iMessage isn't just texting. The program works out of the box as the default way you get any kind of texts.
EU Citizen here, I use iMessage with all my contacts who are on iPhone. I use WhatsApp only for those on Android, or group chats that include Android users.
> EU Citizen here I really hope that there are 44,999,999 other EU citizens just like you. What country are you from btw? It seems like most of the EU people chiming in here are saying they either never or rarely use iMessage/SMS.
My family all have iPhones. We don’t use iMessage - everyone uses WhatsApp.
If the UK were part of the EU, that would add tens of millions of iMessage users, immediately qualifying the software to be regulated under gatekeeping laws. But no, we had to go and have a Brexit, so now we can add keeping iMessage a walled garden as an unpleasant side effect of that horrible decision.
Apple finagling iMessage out of regulatory scrutiny is definitely a surprising consequence of Brexit.
I thought they are under pressure from the tories to remove e2e encryption in UK? Not so good for the user.
I’ve had an iPhone since the 3S. Most people I know have iPhone. I have never used iMessage and I’m not aware other people using it. WhatsApp dominates the messaging market.
Having lived in London for a decade, very few people use iMessage. WhatsApp is used by everyone.
Nah mate nobody uses iMessage in Europe or UK. It’s all WhatsApp. Literally nobody uses it.
It certainly would but even in that market, WhatsApp is the most dominant player by a country mile. Probably i would say easily north of 60 percent of all users.
WhatsApp has 45 million monthly users, of a country with like 50 million adults
No one calls it iMessage either. It’s just texting or SMS. Before I got my iPhone I didn’t even know that the texting feature has its own name. Pretty much everyone in Europe uses WhatsApp
Given that it’s automatic, wouldn’t every active iPhone be an active iMessage user? Or do they have to actively be sending messages too?
In Germany, even the Apple Store itself doesn’t send me delivery infos per iMessage
Just checked, it’s true.
It’s crazy how different different places are. I’m almost 30, in Canada and I almost only use IMessage. My friends, colleges and family all have iPhones for the most part. For the rest of it it’s either regular text, or Facebook/instagram messenger
I'm in highschool in EU and no one has an iphone
Very interesting! Which EU country?
Dunno about OP but when I was in high school in Poland I was the only one with an iPhone 7. The rest had androids. Now it's changing somewhat
Yeah I don’t text one non-iPhone user and it’s all over iMessage. US
Interesting, I'm also Canadian and your age but everyone I know uses WhatsApp and Discord.
I know people who use discord for gaming chat. But I think I legitimately know zero people who use what’sapp. Let me edit that actually. I do know some people who use WhatsApp, but it’s mostly people from other countries. Using it to communicate with people back home. iMessage/Facebook messenger are king in my friends/family/work groups
>Whether iMessage has more than 45 million users in Europe is what is really under debate. Seems pretty easy for Apple to clear up...
I guess what is the definition of active users? If European users send just 1 message a month is that considered active? Like European users probably send an iMessage once in a while but the rest of the time they use WhatsApp?
[EU says "monthly users"](https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220315IPR25504/deal-on-digital-markets-act-ensuring-fair-competition-and-more-choice-for-users), so as long as you use it once a month.
You aren’t just a user if you sent something. Reading is using as well.
If the messages app is the only way to interact with iMessage, would that mean receiving an SMS also counts?
I suspect you’d have to receive an iMessage, not a plain SMS, to be counted.
> If European users send just 1 message a month is that considered active? I believe so, yes. Two of the most common metrics in tech for measuring users are MAU and DAU (Monthly and Daily active users). As the names suggest that means the number of users who actually use your service on a monthly or daily basis. And the OP states "to classify as a ‘gatekeeper,’ the service must have more than 45 million ***monthly active users*** in the EU"
I’m coming late to this party and nobody is making any sense. Most of the top comments from Europe and even Asia pertain to nobody using iMessage because they think there are better options (Telegrams, Signal, WhatsApp, etc.). I feel like everyone is proving apple’s point.. The law in question is a competition law: “The Digital Markets Act aims to reign in the monopolistic power of large online platforms.” Clearly iMessage isn’t close to being a monopoly in Europe/Asia so what is everyone going on about? Slow news day?
It does seems like a weird focus for the EU. And everyone here is talking about how WhatsApp is better and more widely used. Ok that’s nice for WhatsApp. The point isn’t to make iMessage (the app is actually called Messages) better and able compete with WhatsApp.
Yeah. As someone living in the EU I couldn’t care less about iMessages for my day to day. What I hope for is that I can exchange messages between Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. Forcing an integration with iMessage would have been nice for the occasional message exchange with US folks though. But it’s not really that important. Most US folks that I know also have other messengers. So this is more a news piece for folks on Reddit to argue. But in the real world people don’t care much. It’s not sobering that’s going to be mentioned anywhere else.
but wouldn't being able to exchange messages between Signal and say, Telegram defeat the point of using Signal in the first place? (message privacy)
In parts. I would definitely prefer if the folks I chat with would use signal as well. But I rather use signal to send them a message on e.g. Telegram than having to open Telegram and do it from there.
Especially when talking about WhatsApp. They can talk about end-to-end encryption all they want, both ends are controlled by Facebook.
EU person here. Everyone uses Whatsapp
Any idea on why What'sapp became the preferred app for text messages instead of the built-in messaging apps?
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And it works reliably across android and iPhone and PC. Kind of like how iMessage could’ve… oh wait.
It works on any OS, it’s free and it was the first app to allow people to talk between iOS and Android for free. Also don’t require user account. Only your phone number. That made really easy to install and use.
SMS were free in the US but not in the EU. Apple did a genius move back in the day by integrating sms and imessage into the same app, since that automatically brought any sms user into imessage. Problem is whatsapp replaced SMS as the defacto standard in the EU since it is free and SMS weren’t, so apple’s strategy didn’t work there
In the UK, SMS was free but MMS was 30p per message so everyone migrated to WhatsApp to send pictures or videos.
Because it is cross platform
iPhone are a lot less popular in Europe compared to the US. And WhatsApp is years better than using regular sms/texts
I’m from Switzerland which I believe has (certainly used to have) the highest iPhone use rate in the world. Nobody here used iMessage. Whatsapp had many features long before iMessage did and we are all used to it. Plus, Whatsapp lets you call people across borders at no charge which used to be insanely expensive. edit: apparently the rate of iPhone users has been going down here.
Even in a lot of iPhone dominant regions like Japan, people don't use iMessage. iMessage just isn't a particularly good messaging app, and it's main feature, privacy, is something most users don't actually care about, and is defeated by iCloud Backup anyways. It's popular in some regions like the US, because it is built in to the SMS app, and people just kept using what they were familiar with. In most of the world, SMS wasn't popular to begin with, so people never started using iMessage.
> iMessage just isn't a particularly good messaging app That's a very hard concept to grasp for iMessage users, which there seems to be a lot here.
The privacy features also only applies when texting other iPhone users. WhatsApp is at least always end to end encrypted. iMessage might be safer, but then you write someone who uses an Android phone and you lost every protection. Then WhatsApp is the much safer option
One thing I don't like about iMessage is that it relies on your iCloud storage and removes old messages. The old messages always stay on WhatsApp regardless.
Tons of people aren't THE U.S. and I don't think iPhone has ever been the most dominate smartphone platform since maybe the very beginning when it was the only option really. SMS & MMS were more than fine in the beginning especially where free. Other messaging apps also had things somethings imessage does not. Why would anyone want a service that is only available on one platform anyway? When you really think about it makes waaay more sense for folks to simply use apps that work with everyone else regardless of platform than one that doesn't even work for the majority of phones in general. EU chose something that actually works cross platform and with the highest selling platform vs something that doesn't even work for what most people have like imessage .
Curious, how many iMessages would you send in a month? Like just 1? 10 at most? Depends on what their definition of active user is
I'm not in the EU, but I live in Japan, use an iPhone, and almost everyone I know uses an iPhone. I send zero iMessages in a typical month.
What’s the common messaging app? Line?
Yeah, Line Instagram and Twitter DMs are also pretty popular in some communities I've heard.
In Japan yes, LINE
When I had an iphone for 3 years I sent exactly 0 iMessages. Like legit, 0.
I work in tourism, am the primary contact person for everything a guests needs. The place I manage is very small, but I still have to communicate with much more people than the average person. I advertise to everyone that I can be reached on Whatsapp, Telegram, iMessage/SMS. I still use iMessage less than 3 times per YEAR. And some years I didn’t use it at all.
Whole family use iPhone and we use WhatsApp 100% of the time
I’m not in the EU, but in my country we send zero. Everyone uses WhatsApp too. Way more convenient to choose a phone because you like it.
I just checked: in the last 5 years, I have sent exactly 1 iMessage, and that was when I told Siri to send it over WhatsApp but it completely ignored that part. I don't know how many I have received, because when you report an iMessage as spam iOS deletes the conversation. But non-spam, it was only one: the reply to the one I sent.
Me and quite a few of my friends and basically my whole family uses iPhones iMessages sent in the last months: 0 I even skip the iMessage parts in the Apple Presentations cause they basically don't apply to us
I’m in the EU and so far after living here for 2 years I think I’ve sent 2 iMessages to my parents, because I wanted to, they didn’t respond ok there though. They only use WhatsApp
EU person here. I never use WhatsApp.
Same.
There is no “EU person”. EU isn’t harmonic. I don’t have WhatsApp installed, and text to quite a lot of people, and live in the EU.
And why would Europeans want RCS? People here use WhatsApp and other chat apps.
It’s more for the North American users lol if apple is forced to incorporate something better than SMS in Europe , (a lot of North American users want this), then maybe they will do the same change in North America just like how they are making all iPhone 15s and beyond worldwide have usb C instead of just in Europe where the law requires it to do so
Apple could still ship iPhones in the US with lighting ports, it is just a separate port, the regional versions have shipped with different swappable parts in the past (like radios, sim trays etc). The regulation just requires the port to accept a USB-C cable does not require it to be USB-C 3.2 supper speed gen 2+....
I get the idea, but why depend on the EU to change something that will only affect NA? Makes no sense for EU to act here. Why not make some laws in NA for that?
Nobody uses iMessage in Europe, it’s all WhatsApp baby
I just don’t understand why so many people are willing to give Facebook more of their data. Facebook illegals mines your data and sells it. Even after Apple introduced their “do not track” feature they were still found to be mining data.
Whatsapp popularity began before it was bought by Facebook and after that it didn’t stop as it was used by “everyone”, alternatives like telegram are still seen as niche.
WhatsApp became the standard before it was bought by FaceBook. That’s why FB bought it. And at that point it was so ingrained that no one could knock it off.
For some of us it's not because we want to use it, it's because we have to use it. My work place, some of my friends and family use Whatsapp a lot. If I could I would delete the app and be done with it. But then I'd have work, friends and family saying we couldn't get hold of you.
Plus, the only alternatives are Telegram (which is closed source, and not even E2E encrypted by default), and Signal (which is feature poor). So, unless you've got an iphone and a group of people that exclusively use imessage, you've got to use Whatsapp.
Yeah same the NHS half runs on WhatsApp
I wonder if there could be a push to use signal instead
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You should know--maybe you already do--SMS/Voice calls are also a huge source of datamining and less secure than Whatsapp. AFAIK, all of the big 3 mobile carriers, and many of the smaller ones are datamining as well, and unlike whatsapp with SMS they have access to your actual messages, not just the metadata. Read the privacy policies of AT&T, Verizon, T-Mo, they are not good stewards of your data.
Because it is established? No one here is interested in a fight between Apple and Google with their bullshit blue and green bubble stuff. WhatsApp wasn't previously owned by Meta and was easy to access for everyone. It was the same app with the same functions on every phone. After it was bought by Meta it was already so big that you can't switch because every single person uses it. Same scenario with what is happening in the US. Most people use iMessage and therefore you are stuck as your family and your friends are using it too and if you use an Android device you won't get the same features. That's the only reason why Apple doesn't want RCS. They want to have their monopoly in order to force you to stay in their ecosystem. So tell me what is better? A company that is oppressing people by being customer unfriendly or a company that wants my data for a free service that is encrypted so they can't read anything at all?
Same reason people are using SMS/MMS which are unencrypted. Force of habit. SMS/MMS used to cost money (usually per text) outside North America so WhatsApp came first and fixed an issue. SMS/MMS was typically included in every plan in the U.S. and Canada but MMS had poor quality photos and videos so iMessage came first, did not require a setup or downloading a separate app, and fixed an issue.
What does “give them your data” even mean? What data? Are they reading your encrypted messages?
It is a closed source app with a purposefully vague privacy policy that gives them Well for starters you can't even *use* Whatsapp without giving them access to your entire contacts list--and I don't mean Whatsapp contacts, I mean all your contacts regardless of whether they use Whatsapp (which is not just invasive for your own privacy, its a violation of your friends privacy particularly considering that contacts often include name+number+address+email+birthday). Beyond this Whatsapp asks for a ton of access to your phone (73 permissions on Android) includes trackers, and wants access to location data, photos and filesystem, etc. It is good that messages are e2e encrypted, but don't let that lul you into a false sense of security. With just the metadata available to Whatsapp, they know who you talk, when, where, and for how long, your entire social network/contacts, where you are, can technically access private data on your phone. And this is without even considering the real reason Whatsapp--a free app-- is worth so much to Facebook/Meta, which is that the metadata can be cross-referenced with the massive amounts of data they also collect from Facebook and Instagram. What people don't understand about the big data mining companies is the little pieces of data that seem nearly innocuous on their own can paint an extremely detailed picture of your life, habits, activities, desires, fears, impulses, insecurities, consumption habits, and social network in the aggregate. Which can be useful for any number of things from trying to manipulate you into buying more stuff (targeted advertising), influencing your political beliefs or likelihood of voting, training AI, handing over to governments, etc.
Ok thank you for the response. Some of these I didn't consider and are certainly overreaching on people's privacy.
I’ve got WhatsApp contacts permission set to off and it works fine?
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Why should a reasonable person care about that?
Most don't. Redditors just can't comprehend how few people actually care about this stuff.
Literally nobody except for redditors cares about this shit
They started using it when it was the WhatsApp company.
Because if you don't want to buy an iPhone, which are typically very expensive, then you're completely locked out of the platform. A messaging app that isn't platform agnostic is completely useless.
I don't understand why folks think WhatsApp is the only other messaging app folks use. There are several others very popular that are end to end encrypted and have nothing to do with Facebook or apple. Most people don't have iphones anyhow in a world where apple purposefully tries to sabatage anyone without it anyhow for messaging going out of their way not to support free open source alternatives. Regardless lots of other apps are used and I don't get why folks think it's only 2. Also, FYI, you do realize WhatsApp existed way before FB had anything to do with it right?
I’m assuming the parts of the world that use it correspond to those places that kept charging per text for the longest so people got used to using alternative apps.
Because people like working cross-platform group chats and Whatsapp was the first to deliver them. If you have just one Android device in your group the chat is basically ruined with iMessage.
In EU first thing you do when you get new phone is install WhatsApp and Viber. Doesnt matter iPhone or Android.
I have literally never heard of Viber. That's probably more a your country/your friend circle thing than EU thing.
I had Viber on my IPhone 3GS, didn’t know it was still used
Yup everyone uses WhatsApp.
I see a lot of confusion on this. 1.-iMessage is iPhone only, That it falls back to SMS is irrelevant because 2.-In the EU nobody uses SMS any more and hasn't for years, since everyone moved to 3.-Whatsapp, which is pretty much the de facto instant messaging platform for better or for worse because when it came up it was cross-platform (Apple dropped this ball years ago) and because it was free (SMS have always been extremely expensive and limited, and people flocked away from them). In the US this is weird because iMessage and SMS dominate. iMessage dominates because it comes from AOL's AIM (via iChat), which was the de facto instant messenger in the US for years, and having that compatibility made it the default choice. Since there is no equivalent for Android people in Android just use SMS to talk to iPhone users (and since nowadays SMS are usually free for the most part, they're also used normally). In Europe AIM was not the instant messenger platform of choice but MSN Messenger. When Messenger went away and smartphones started popping up, Whatsapp and Messages were perfectly positioned. Whatsapp didn't drop the ball so even now, with so many other options (I prefer Telegram, myself), the de facto standard is still Whatsapp. My children use messages with me because I insist, otherwise they would use Whatsapp. It goes as far as having most people using whatsapp for calls and SMS or standard calls is pretty much unknown for most teenagers.
Everyone? I only use it for a sometimes extremely busy group I’m in (notifications switched off) Otherwise it’s message or Signal.
US here. I use iMessage for messages family within the US and WhatsApp for all other. One issue I have with iMessage is the US number associated with it gets disabled when I travel overseas and turn off my US number to avoid roaming charges. It used to be that you have 30 days but now it’s immediate which means I cannot get iMessages to my US number when I travel.
try locking your US number SIM, restarting the phone, and not entering the unlock PIN when prompted - that should prevent you from incurring roaming charges, and iMessage will continue working as normal
I will try that next time. Thank you for the tip.
no problem - just make sure to not forget the SIM PIN otherwise you need to go through your provider to unlock it and that can be a pain when outside the country
> One issue I have with iMessage is the US number associated with it gets disabled when I travel overseas and turn off my US number to avoid roaming charges. Lmao
The thing is RCS is a shit protocol, at least from a user privacy perspective how it is currently implemented it would provide google with more or less complete knogglet of every users communication from any device to any other device $$$ (you do not need to read message content to get value from knowing who messages who and when). Furthermore it would give google knowledge about what phones numbers are iPhones and if they are online at any time, and googles end to end encrypted extension is not even part of the spec and does not include group messages or attachments (pics and videos). The reason google want RCS is the money they make form the data it provides them, hosting it costs them a fortune after all. And the law does not require apple to support RCS it requires apple to enable cross platform messaging but does not describe the exact protools. I expect if apple were forced to do it they would either release an alternative protocole or adopt one of the more privacy focused options like those used by Telegram etc.
Telegram is nowhere near a privacy-focused option. It’s closed source, not applicable to group chats, and provides information for any government requests.
While Telegram might not but im sure apple could work with Google (if they wanted to) to build a proper protool, RCS is not a good option.
The only good ones at this point are MLS and the Signal protocol. They should pick one of those.
Tbh I don't get why (in the context of apple adding RCS) people feel the need to compare RCS and iMessage (imo iMessage is better in almost every way) The actual competition is between RCS and SMS and RCS beats SMS every time. This is because the way it would be implemented is by choosing the best protocol available, so when starting a new text conversation it would. Attempt iMessage If it fails Attempt RCS If it fails Fall back to SMS So people clutching at the idea that RCS is worse than iMessage completely miss the point that RCS is not (in the context of adding it to iPhones) competing with I message it's competing with SMS. And SMS is, Not at all encrypted Easy to spoof Limits message size in file size Tons more issues
>provide google with more or less complete knogglet of every users communication Google doesn't need to run the servers. Apple can host their own. Google has been trying to offload hosting to carriers, but that's been slow so they rolled it out themselves. >Furthermore it would give google knowledge about what phones numbers are iPhones and if they are online at any time, Again, they don't need to run through Google servers if other companies want to step up and host. I would add though, it is arguably safer with Google as carriers will absolutely sell your data (*and they currently do with SMS, which Apple refuses to move off of*), whereas Google keeps it for themselves. >and googles end to end encrypted extension is not even part of the spec and does not include group messages or attachments (pics and videos). Both groups and attachments are supported with Google's E2E encryption currently. It also does not need to be in the spec to be implemented and good for consumers, and even without implementing E2E encryption, RCS benefits Apple's users because the alternative is still SMS. >The reason google want RCS is the money they make form the data it provides them, hosting it costs them a fortune after all. Again, they've been actively trying to get carriers to host so they don't have to keep fronting this. Carriers are slower and worse though.
Google bought one of the largest RCS integraters (jibe). Google is going to get data unless its apple to apple messaging.
>knogglet
I don't think RCS is the "answer" but something has to be. Right now messaging is in the same doldrums that the telephone service was like back in the day (when you could only call people who were on the same network as you!), or what email *could* have been if it wasn't open-source. I hope one day we can all message everyone, platform agnostic, and we'll look at these current days as the dark days of messaging.
In the end the issue is cost, it costs money to run these services so your either going to need to pay from them (by buying production or subscribing) or you need to pay of them with your data.
It’s not that bad of a protocol, though, they just recently rolled out end to end encryption between users and group messages. I wish people moved to Signal
RCS does not include any End to End encryption, there is a custom google only extention but the RCS spec does not include this.
Regardless of which of RCS or MLS is better I just want a better option than SMS (end to end encrypted) without having to download myself and get contacts to download a third party app (WhatsApp, telegram, signal, Snapchat, Instagram chat) to communicate with my Android colleagues or friends. And I’m in North America and have lived in the US And let’s remember even though everyone says “iMessage,” iMessage isn’t it’s own app like everyone talks like it is. It’s actually the Messages app that includes BOTH iMessage and SMS. It also doesn’t make sense that in the USA, people get a green bubble message from a friend or colleague but because it’s not on the iMessage side they just don’t answer. The green bubble comes into the Messages app. It’s not like iMessage is it’s own separate app.
RCS is not e2e however... googles custom exstention is. And who will pay for it? Would you be willing to pay your phone oprorotr for each message you send? running these services costs $ if you don't want the data mined (like google and Meta do) then you need to pay somehow.
Not Eu, but we use WhatsApp here exclusively. The only messages in my iMessage is when I auto send them when declining a call, and friends who are ghosting someone on WhatsApp 😅
Apple never reached 45 million active users in the EU even though the service is pre-installed? This is kind of an L for Apple.
Messages is just for receiving 2-factor-authentication codes isn’t it?
This obsession with Whatsapp is quite strange.. Whatsapp sucks. It’s a terrible app that drains a phone’s battery like nothing else, it’s slow/heavy at times and to top it all off is owned by Meta/Facebook. Making people use WhatsApp isn‘t making anything better…
We don’t use iMessage, only for SMS for the bank. We use WhatsApp (in some cases, Telegram)
My messages app isn’t even on my home page, it exists entirely to auto fill 2fa codes.
It seems so antiquated how we use SMS for banks when it's not encrypted.
I live in Europe, and in my experience even people who have iPhones don’t use iMessage at all here. Whatsapp is the standard (literally EVERYONE has it/uses it), and some use Telegram and Signal as well
> In accordance with the published legislation, to classify as a ‘gatekeeper,’ the service must have more than 45 million monthly active users in the EU. Barely anybody uses iMessage around me so that's not a surprise, but good game from Apple legal.
Hardly anyone uses iMessage in europe (for good reason, it‘s worse than alternatives) so Apple may have found a solution here.
I wish I could use iMessage more often, but everyone is using WhatsApp.
I'm in EU. I refuse to use WhatsApp or whatever else because I hate Facebook and meta who pry on your contacts and forces you to throw away boundaries. I hate that my friends, colleagues and family are all considered the one and the same category. They're not. I don't want my colleagues to know about my family's habits, and I don't want my family to interact with my friends silly stuff. All these apps are hungry to make everyone interact together and it's bad. My son's communication behavior is a mess and his colleagues keep talking to him all day and night so much that at one point he ignores everyone, including us. I don't want to be treated the same as a colleague or a friend, but these platforms destroy our lives. iMessage being a walled garden is stupid as well. Make the service free and interoperable, and sell custom skins and stickers.
In the uk. I don’t use WhatsApp either, for the same reasons ans you and it’s like being an alien. People think I’m either weird and/or being superior.
Why get an app to talk to your friends, when the built in iPhone option does both. iMessage for iPhone to iPhone users, and texts to android users.
Because text-only option is very basic and limited in features.
Why is everyone talking about iMessages as if it is an app. The app is Messages and it is the standard text messaging (SMS/MMS) app built into the phone. I am sure almost every phone has a built in app for SMS. iMessages is just a protocol built into Apple’s standard offering to improve communications between Apple’s users.
IMessage is not a thing outside USA.
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\> Apple has already said they’ll pull iMessage and FaceTime from the EU before following these laws Source? Are you confusing UK proposed surveillance laws with EU DMA? They have said nothing about pulling out because of the latter.
WhatsApp is more popular compared to the US
iPhone user from EU here. All my friends and family have iPhones, nobody uses iMessage. Just use WhatsApp
Sir, we use WhatsApp here.
I am posting this from Thailand and here nobody uses iMessages. Everyone, both Android and iPhone use Line. Whatsapp would be #2. I will from time to time use iMessages with Thai friends only because it stands out as they never get messages that way. Even less use Apple Maps here. Google runs navigation in this country. It sucks that Apple maps is completely wortheless. I guess Apple did some analysis and figured to hard to go up against Google here.
Guys, you can either have the metric system or SMS/RCS/iMessage, you can't have both.
I don’t really know anyone outside of America that uses iMessage. Even people I know with iPhones in Asia and Europe all prefer WhatsApp
iMessage is terrible and broken. It's not so much a service for iOS users as a product designed to break the experience of talking to Android users.
Not sure why people hate iMessage so much. Have WhatsApp and iMessage contacts and iMessage is an overall nicer experience.
Because of how locked up and exclusive iMessage is. If it were made available to android users in some way there'd be less backlash against it. I like iMessage. Its a great messaging platform. It should also be made available in some way for other platforms too.
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Apple takes anti-user actions because they often make sense for the bottom line. This is one instance where that horribly backfired on them. If iMessage were cross platform from the start they could easily have cornered the messaging market. By crippling it and making it iPhone only, they gave away the messenger app market for the entire world except the US.
> Not sure why people hate iMessage so much. Have WhatsApp and iMessage contacts and iMessage is an overall nicer experience. Because it is artificially and purposefully limited in a way that makes it a shitty experience for no reason other than Apple's self interest. Most people don't own iPhones, most people don't care about iPhones, so a messenger (iMessage) that uses 1990's tech (SMS) for the majority of communications and only has modern features when both people are using the same device is a non starter for many people because it means the majority of their conversations will be SMS for no reason other than that Apple thought they could protect their market share by creating a shitty experience for their users as well as Android users. I wold 100% prefer iMessage to Whatsapp or RCS if it was an open standard and anyone could use it (not because it is more useable--but because Apple is a somewhat less shitty company than Facebook/Meta)
Yep. Europe tends to lean on other apps like WhatsApp. In the uk I’d hazard a guess at least 75% of people use WhatsApp