Not sure where you’re talking about in Asia. Vietnam uses Zalo, China has Wechat, Japan has Line, Korea has Kakaotalk, Thailand I think is Line as well. I think the average tech-aware person in at least East Asia doesn’t know what WhatsApp even is.

There is no 'Asia'. Every country is unique. Hong Kong mostly uses Whatsapp (though some Telegram and Wechat as well), Singapore uses Whatsapp a lot, Turkey uses Whatsapp, Indonesia too...

As a non American, what problem does the US have with SMS?

I can confirm essentially no one in western Europe uses iMessage. I've seen people use FaceTime to call friends, but I've yet to even see someone open the iMessage app in person.

Yep. Also the iMessage&SMS being in the same place makes the app very prone to spam. I have nothing more than 2FA codes and marketing spam in my iMessage app because the iMessage app is actually integrated with SMS and is called Messages.

I use facetime quite a lot though, because it works better than everything else.

At least in Germany quite a few people still pay for each SMS, so having both in the same convo is actively undesired since at least with e.g. Whatsapp there will be no surprise costs.

I guess the "problem" is that American iPhone users will either exclude non-iPhone users altogether or default to SMS rather than switching to a cross-platform messaging app, despite the deficiencies of SMS in modern communication, e.g. poor support for group chats and sending images or videos.

If "essentially no one" uses it, why does the EU feel compelled to regulate it?

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220315IP...

The link you provided does not specifically talk about imessage

"EU lawmakers agreed that the largest messaging services (such as Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage) will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms"

> Neither Europe or Asia use iMessage, they use WhatsApp.

That's really a simplistic way of thinking. It is marked specific sure, but China have WeChat as the dominate messaging app. Denmark has some level of WhatsApp penetration for sure, but it's lower than iMessage (23% vs 33%), in some circles it is really noticeable if you switch to Android. iMessages is also a bit weird, because a large number of people do not care that it's technically iMessage, it just the messaging app on the phone, meaning it's SMS (even if it's technically not). I believe Sweden is rather similar. You also have to consider how many have multiple messaging apps installed. My guess is that a large number of the WhatsApp users are still available on iMessage.

I don't think it makes sense to entire continent or even countries as being WhatsApp or iMessage. We have to view it in much smaller circles. Like businesses, income classes or circles of friends and family.

Either you people don't know what iMessage is or you have strange way of defining usage.

>more than 70% of the possible iPhone population doesn't use iMessage.

Based on? Are they not receiving SMS messages at all?

>The rest of the world doesn't have the SMS problem that the US has.

So why are they using Whatsapp?