I'm in France with friends in the UK and Germany, and have never been asked to join a group on anything else other than WhatsApp. Not once.

(Well, at some point a year or two ago there was some controversy around WhatsApp, and some groups tried to migrate to Signal, but that all died out within a month -- never quite started, actually).

Believe it or not, I had almost never heard about iMessage and its specific quirks before the Beeper story (and still don't understand why the colors of the messages in green or blue matter).

Well.. I’m further north east and my experience is somewhat different. My only point was that Europe is not as homogenous as some people keep implying (most people still primarily communicate in their native language which creates a lot of more or less isolated bubbles)

> and still don't understand why the colors of the messages in green or blue matter

Because it indicates a fallback to standard SMS/text messaging which means all the more advanced features (which everyone expect messaging apps to have these days) stop working if you get a text from an Android device.

Thanks for this- perhaps it's all too easy for both sides of the pond to look across and generalize that the other's problems aren't happening in their backyard. Because what you describe sounds quite complicated. Wouldn't everyone just prefer a secure, modern texting app that could message literally anyone with a phone number? Without having them download a specific app? Then we could all text together without the headaches.

> Wouldn't everyone just prefer..

Sure, but I don’t think personal preferences matter that much in this case, most people just end up using what everyone else is whether they like it or not, which makes perfect sense.

But yeah, I think in most of Europe (not all, they were free/almost free since the late 2000s where I am) this started because SMS messages very relatively very expensive back when smartphones were becoming widespread.

Now WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, Viber and whatever else there is are quite entrenched so even if Apple and Google get serious about properly supporting RCS it might get tricky to get users to switch back to the default client

Popular non open-source 3rd party messaging apps don’t really have much interest in supporting interoperability due to obvious reasons.

> ..modern texting app that could message literally anyone with a phone number? Without having them download a specific app?

Well on this thread it seems that WhatsApp might be exactly that from the perspective of some people (to the extent that they don’t even believe that anyone in Europe could be using anything else)

All this is fair and your accounting of the reasons for the situation around Europe match my research so far.

I do want to say I've seen some others in this HN story contradict that Europe is as homogenous as your representing here though.

Still though, I looked at Germany's Whatsapp numbers and it's like 68% of the population, ignoring the fact that 1 account is not necessarily 1 person.

That's super dominant compared to the US which is somewhere around 22% with the same account assumption.

> That's super dominant

True. But it’s hard to say to what extent. Many/most people probably have multiple apps installed and use them somewhat regularly in addition to texting/iMessages.

I like the separation that different messaging platforms offer.

> Wouldn't everyone just prefer a secure, modern texting app that could message literally anyone with a phone number? Without having them download a specific app? Then we could all text together without the headaches.

https://m.xkcd.com/927/

I’m not sure what messaging standard you propose gets adopted, because the flavour du jour of most non-iMessage users is RCS, which as an open standard, is unencrypted and insecure.