I don't think most of US in the EU really mind, or even know what messaging app people in America use. The privacy conscious folk around here do tend to prefer Signal over Whatsapp though.

A lot of people, in Austria at least, have moved to signal in my experience. My communities in the US and Austria have trended toward adoption of Signal with very few holdovers between messages and WhatsApp, some partly due to my pressure but overall it’s just getting away from the BS of the alts

> and from what I've seen, often act as if that is some sort of mark of superiority.

Feels like you weren't able to have a proper discussion with those people. In many EU countries, using SMS made/makes no sense because SMS was/is super expensive as compared to WhatsApp. And using iMessage makes no sense because most people don't have an iPhone. From their point of view, it actually makes no sense.

Now if you tell them "well, where I come from everybody has an iPhone" or "SMS have always been free", probably they won't say "still, I'm better than you for no apparent reason".

I don't think that it is actually seen as a mark of superiority anywhere in the EU to use WhatsApp. Unlike apparently in some places it is seen as a mark of superiority to have an iPhone vs an Android phone.

If you go in a EU country where SMS were not prohibitively expensive in the beginning of WhatsApp (e.g. France), you'll see that WhatsApp has been less successful (at least in the beginning). WhatsApp was a killer app because it was free SMS, really.

>because it was free SMS, really.

Since when can WhatsApp interact with SMS users? They're so evil and predatory that they have entirely walled themselves off from that method of communication entirely.

I like how they (just like imessage) allow you to message someone who cant possibly read the message because they have no whatsapp. Then again, I think they cant even deliver the message over sms on iphone? SMS is only available in the apple app if you first force it to send SMS?

WhatsApp gained popularity in Europe when non-early adopters started switching to smartphones (2010-2012 ish). The difference was that, in contrast to iMessage, you could install it on pretty much any smartphone. In the pre-Meta days they even supported many then dying ecosystems like Symbian, Nokia S40, etc.

They had a yearly subscription fee, but most people never got the request to pay it.

Nobody cared that it was incompatible with SMS, because everybody hated SMS because of the insane prices. In 2009 I got an iPhone 3G with an unlimited data plan, but I was still paying something like 0.20 or 0.25 Euro per SMS.

I never had problems telling people: "oh I use this other one" and they probably have it alongside whatsapp.

There's always that one Facebook mom that refuses to use anything but FB Messenger, then get's upset why nobody reads her messenges.

>often act as if that is some sort of mark of superiority

Well, you could argue that it's morally superior to be reachable by everyone, regardless of what brand of phone they use.

The ability to install a 3rd party messaging app also shows some technical skill.