I've only heard of this happening in the US and Canada. Outside of North America, everyone uses Whatsapp, which supports group messaging on every platform. I'd be curious to know why it hasn't penetrated into those countries.

I think it has to do with the fact that the US (and Canada) very early on had unlimited texting plans, and iMessage would make use of that (iPhones just send texts for iMessages in absence of a data connection). WhatsApp can only use data, which is cheaper and used to be unlimited (that's gone) in the EU. In contrast, texting was and still is insanely expensive in the EU (per byte it is staggering even, compared to normal data). Since data coverage was poor in the US in the 2G days (is this true? In the EU 2G was GPRS, meaning available when normal voice was available... I think it differs for US networks?) and texting was often included in a subscription, iMessage made a lot if sense and was very reliable.

I remember early iPhone users complaining here in the EU that their iPhone unpredictably would sent iMessages either for free over wifi or for 50ct/message over sms/text (us EU citizens avoid sms/texting like the plague, allthough unlimited plans are now more commonplace, it's just too late). I recently set Signal to deal with my sms/text messages. Boy was that an expensive mistake when I accidentally texted my friend in Curacao instead of sending a normal Signal message.

>WhatsApp can only use data, which is cheaper and used to be unlimited (that's gone) in the EU. In contrast, texting was and still is insanely expensive in the EU (per byte it is staggering even, compared to normal data).

You need to specify where in the EU, because it doesn't mirror my experience in France for instance. Data used to be very expensive while there were no shortages of plans with near-unlimited texts. It also isn't the case in many other countries in the world in my experience. AFAIK the advantage of WhatsApp over plain texts isn't that it's cheaper per-se, it's that it works over wi-fi which means that as long as you find a hotspot anywhere in the world you can use it. No need to worry about roaming fees, no need to worry about how many texts or MB of data are in your plan.

In the Netherlands 10 euro for truly unlimited was commonplace. I held on to that plan from 2011 until last year, when they decide I couldn't have 4G and unlimited data.

You really don't need to specify where in the EU, because there are vastly more people in France communicating regularly with people in other neighboring countries. If you need to specify where in the EU, then you need to specify where in the US as well, because France is about the size of a single US state.

Americans mostly talk to other Americans, who also have unlimited texting plans. French people are probably talking to people who live in Belgium, Germany, the UK, Spain, etc. who will all encourage them to use WhatsApp.

Texting plans got huge allowances early on in the UK. I don't remember ever seeing unlimited data plans. However, the thing that was really expensive was "multimedia" messages (MMS), and occasionally you'd generate one of these by mistake by including an emoji in an SMS then suddenly be charged a whole pound for it.

International texting is expensive though, while it's free in Whatsapp. Which is why it took off among various diasporas.

> texting was and still is insanely expensive in the EU

In Poland at least, SMS costs 0 in almost all plans.

As for WhatsApp, I try to keep people away from it and show them Signal, as I do not trust Facebook with any of my data.

Poland has unusually cheap and good cell service, at least in the parts of the country I've visited.

Whatsapp's dominance everywhere outside the US has nothing to do with the generous texting plans here. These were common all over Europe as well. The reason the US has been slower to transition to data-based texting is due to our size and the rarity of Americans traveling internationally.

Imagine if every state in the US was a different country. That's basically Europe. Say you got charged roaming fees every time you traveled from New York to Connecticut. This was true in Europe until they passed regulation that mandated compatibility.

Wi-fi had no roaming upcharge. Hence why texting that works over wi-fi became the default.

It is also that the penetration of iPhones is not as high in many regions. WhatsApp, WeChat, Line are all dominant in places, especially in regions where your peer group can't all afford a $300 phone. And people don't switch to the more limited iMessage when they do become wealthier, or when cheap second hand iPhones become common.

WA solves a problem that doesn't exist if all your contacts use an iphone.

And it hadn't exactly "not penetrated" NA, there are probably tens of millions of users. But it's definitely not "the default mode of communication" as in Brazil or India (+ lots of other countries).

I won't use it because of who owns it (Facebook).

Because iphone is bigger here and I assume you understand momentum and iphone exercising their oligopolistic practices of keeping people on their brand entirely rather than opening up their iMessage protocol. I don't know about your country, but in the USA it pretty much takes the federal government to take on one of the biggest companies in the world.

I don't really know anyone that uses Whatsapp in Finland. Most of my friends use Telegram these days.

Literally everyone outside of tech bubble.

In the university i’m affiliated with and the companies i’ve worked with, only IT people use Telegram. Everyone else still defaults to whatsapp.

Another datapoint, from Norway:

Everyone of my closest friends use Telegram. I share a number of groups with 300-400 people (family, extended family, organizations I belong to/contribute to etc).

Last time I got a message on WhatsApp was from an ex-colleague 2 years ago or something. With my new phone I didn't even bother installing it.

That said: none of my current colleagues (in tech) uses Telegram or WhatsApp for that matter.

I live in Helsinki. Literally everyone +1. I don't know anyone preferring telegram.

Telegram has been criticized over and over for home grown encryption by people I consider experts so I skip it and stick with Signal.

Good for you but the problem still exists for other people.

It has not been my experience that everybody in China uses WhatsApp.

Do you suppose they mostly use WeChat there?

Is that a sign of Apple’s dominance, though? It just feels like inertia because the existing solution worked well enough for your friend group.

In that case wouldn’t it make sense to try to get your friends to use another group chat?

I get people love to use the iMessage groups, but every friend I have on Android create a WhatsApp group, etc. and it’s pretty trivial to use and maintain, especially with close friends.

> In that case wouldn’t it make sense to try to get your friends to use another group chat?

This greatly underestimates the power of habit and default choice.

I can tell you for sure that if I tried to mount such campaign among my (non-techie) friends, there would be a lot of pushback and annoyance.

But this doesn't seem at all relevant to market competition and antitrust laws. It's not much different than disagreements over which coffee shop your friends are going to meet at (maybe you're the only one that lives really far away from the group's most convenient location), or who gets invited to a group of friends' parties.

Wouldn’t it be easier to get each and every one of your friends to change their daily behaviour to suit a personal choice you made?

Erm, no, no it would not be.

If anyone else is facing the issue, here's how to deregister your number from iMessage:

https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/

Should be Job Done.

It isn’t, though. Group MMSes are notoriously fickle, and doing something like sending a video to the group without it appearing in potato quality feels all but impossible at times. iMessage simply is better for group messaging.

The fact that SMS group messages suck isn't something that Apple can really fix without an oob protocol which would basically be iMessage again.

They could open up iMessage, which they originally said they were going to do, then stopped talking about it entirely. Even if they didn’t want to open it up they could make an iMessage Android app, like their Apple Music app.

When did Apple say they were going to open iMessage? I do recall Steve Jobs saying this about Facetime [1] during its announcement, and that a) it was a surprise to the team building it, and b) was abandoned when Apple was sued for patent infringement by patent troll VirnetX [2], causing them to change the protocol from peer-to-peer to server-based.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1xuzif/what_ever_hap... [2]: https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/16/apple-faces-440-million-...

Feel free to thanks VirnetX about that... https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/10/17222380/apple-virtnetx-p...

It tough to blame Apple for not open-sourcing a protocol they are sued about by a patent troll. Until resolved properly this would be a toxic code-base anyway.

Of course they could restart from scratch, but I guess they have no incentive to make efforts about that. What will be meaningful however is be what they'll do after patent exhaustion date of infringed VirnetX "patents".

Apple just finished closing down (pretty sure) all their stores in the East District of TX so all these suits can no longer be filed there. Might help conclude a bunch of these...or not...it's a ton of money we're talking about.

They were going to open FaceTime, not iMessage.

I deregistered my number and I still have messages that are delivered to my iPad instead of my android phone. If it wasn’t for that iPad next to my bed, I would have lost contact with some people entirely.

What Apple’s doing should be fucking prosecuted by the FCC or FTC. It’s outrageous.

I suspect those messages mighty be using e-mail rather than phone number as the identifier.

So what, if iMessage is the default SMS app and it sends to an unregistered iCloud account, it should either translate to SMS or give an error.

The last thing it should do is silently send a message to an inactive account such that it looks like I ghosted the person.

The process deregisters the phone number from the account; it does not shut down the entire iCloud account or disable iMessage entirely.

"iMessages" sent to your phone number will be translated to SMS.

iMessages sent to your email address will still be delivered to the account associated with that email address. They can be accessed on pretty much any modern apple device associated with that account.

It's rare that people intentionally iMessage an email address, but the interface is opaque enough that it's essentially impossible on an existing text chain to tell that you did (unless you're specifically looking for that information).

The behavior as implemented makes sense provided that every user made an intentional and informed choice when choosing to message a friend via phone number or email. That is, of course, not the case (and is not helped by Siri sometimes silently deciding to use a contact's email over their phone number).

It is not an unregistered account if it is being received on an iPad.

Further, if you are not logged in with the account on at least one device, it will not show as delivered.

iPads don't have phone numbers so the person sending you the message is sending it to an Apple ID, not a phone number. This is working exactly the way it's supposed to.

No, it's really not. If I unregister from iMessage the last thing that should happen is my Apple ID swallowing messages from people's iPhones.

Return an error or redirect to SMS, it's not that fucking hard.

The one thing you are right about is that it's an intentional dark pattern on Apple's part to obsfucate Apple IDs and phone numbers. It's an illegal anticompetitve strategy.

No, you're misunderstanding what's happening. If you unregister your phone number from iMessage, then that's the end of it. People sending messages to your phone number will get SMS messages. It is impossible for a de-registered phone number to receive iMessages on an iPad. What's actually happening is that the people who are sending you messages are sending them to your Apple ID instead and iMessage is always registered to an Apple ID so the messages are delivered to your iPad. It's not swallowing anyone's messages from people's iPhones because that's literally not possible.

It's not a dark pattern. It's not an illegal anti-competitive strategy. It's a successful delivery of a message to the recipient address it was sent to that you're simply misunderstanding.

I'm not misunderstanding anything. I want to opt out of iMessage being bound to my Apple ID.

I don't give a shit what address or phone number people think they're sending to, when they see my name on their iPhone, it's the wrong address.

The only reason my iPad even has iMessage installed is because people were sending me messages that got disappeared by Apple's abysmal policy.

Why is this so hard for you to understand?

Apple is the richest company in the world but for some reason their process for delisting your Apple ID from iMessage is a huge fucking joke.

There's no way this is not an intentional decision on their part.

Yes, you are misunderstanding. I don't see how that's not obvious to you. iMessage is tied to an Apple ID. Unregistering your phone number from that Apple ID doesn't turn iMessage off. The fact that you think it does is where you misunderstand. The only way to turn off iMessage from an Apple ID is to turn off iMessage for the devices that are set up to receive those messages.

It's literally impossible to send an SMS message to someone's Apple ID and it's not possible to send an iMessage to a phone number that's been unregistered from iMessage. Just because you don't understand how it works doesn't mean Apple is at fault. You cannot delist an Apple ID from iMessage, you can only sign out of iMessage on a receiving device. That's it. Anything else above that is your fault.

If you don't want to receive iMessages at all and don't want people sending them to you, sign out of iMessage. It's not that hard.

What happens if you go to Settings > Messages > Send & Receive, tap on your Apple ID and sign out of the iMessage account for your Apple ID?

I once heard my spouse complaining about Signal, and how they only had it loaded on their iPhone so they could talk to me. I asked why Signal was not their default SMS application, like it is on my Android phone. And that's when I discovered that Apple hoards certain core phone features for itself.

Signal for iOS cannot send or receive ordinary SMS messages. This is a significant impediment to adoption of end-to-end encryption, because checking two applications to receive different kinds of messages is inconvenient, and inconvenience is the death of mobile applications.

And here I note that Apple is effectively punishing users for apostasy. If you leave the Apple ecosystem, you are excommunicated from your former chat contacts. I, having never entered the Apple ecosystem, have no problem being included in group chats with iPhone users. (I occasionally have problems receiving media attachments, though.)

This makes me even more wary of ever buying in, knowing that trying to leave later will cause all manner of problems as I try to reclaim functions that Apple will take over. Entering the walled gardens make me afraid of being locked in.

Another issue with Signal -- you can't backup your chat logs on iOS like you do on Android (chat logs are encrypted btw).

I'm not sure if that's a Signal issue or an Apple restriction.

It's Signal.

>Signal for iOS cannot send or receive ordinary SMS messages.

That's not an iOS limitation, though. I can send and receive SMS messages through Google Voice on iOS without any issue.

Google Voice doesn't use the SIM card in the phone to send SMS so it can bypass any of Apples API restrictions.

How does that matter? Signal doesn't have to use the SIM card either.

Because most people probably want to use their existing phone number which is tied to their SIM card.

I don't really understand why I got downvoted for a 100% accurate and truthful statement.

SMS group chats work fine on all platforms I know of. If your friends don’t like you for having an android phone and kick you off for forcing the Green bubble in group chats, the problem is not Apple’s phones or software. It’s something else entirely.