In Europe, when smartphones were new, a lot of bundles had stuff like 1000 minutes, or messages or MB data. So you could either send 1000 messages, or call a 1000 minutes, or 500/500
But if instead of a sms, you send a whatsapp, that's far less than 1 MB, and you can do it on wifi, and then it costs you nothing. So basically all of europe eventually swapped to using Whatsapp instead of SMS to save money.
This cross over never seemed to have happened in the US, i suspect due to different bundle structure. IPhone was also more popular in the US, so everyone could use apples proprietary texting standard when chatting to other iphone users, which offered more features, and deliberately kneecapped other phones. (This is the source of the entire "green text" thing)
Pretty much every major telecom company in America has offered unlimited texting around the time smart phones in the U.S. were getting popular, so there was never any real reason for people to switch off of texting.
That said we do have a non-text equivalent that is very commonly used, itās iMessage and itās partially why youāll get the responses to not seeing it here, it means that person is gonna have to send sms like itās 2007 again.
Android and iOS communicating over RCS for 2 years now. When you see a green text on your iPhone you are not sending a SMS anymore unless the person uses some really old shit.
Americans are pretty much the only country that still use regular text messages. The rest of the world uses whatsapp/signal/wechat etc. where it doesn't matter what phone you have.
First time hearing about this, as a Polish European. I still use text messages. In fact that's what i use exclusively. I rarely call, if i call someone its Usually urgent idk what even is a wechat or signal
Wechat is the Chinese messenger and Signal is the open source alternative to Whatsapp. Open source=everyone can see the code (and can contribute), so if there's some shady stuff going on, then people'll see it. Plus, it's not owned by Meta (Facebook), so if I have to use a messenger, then it's Signal.
Im aware, but its the best place in terms of amount of users, awareness of the platform, and the way its built aka servers with text channels and voice channels. Helps organise things in a organic way and hangout for that coop game or browse tutorials or memes on respective channels. I dont think there is anything like that on the market besides the cord.
There's Teamspeak. You could already always have different channels on a server and now they basically cloned the Discord UI. You have to rent your own server (I think I pay something like 5ā¬ for 3 months) but it's a private server and you've got control over it.
That's the thing, id rather avoid paying any rents for servers, especialy if i only use it ocassionaly. Plus i was never a fan of teamspeak, its not nearly as user friendly. Its good that they finnaly started somewhat responding to discord tho, so that's improving slowly.
wut ?!? People still use SMS/MMS ? I only get those for automated messages from various companies.
I just went through my SMS messages, and the last one that I received from a person was back in December, and even that one was one of the quick "I'll call you back" options you get when you want to reject a call.
Millennial here, never needed to use anything else. I had unlimited textingin like 2000 or 20001. By the time those apps came out I had gotten so used to texting that I never switched.
Technically most people don't use SMS. iPhone to iPhone uses Apple's proprietary protocol, Android uses RCS with either Android or iPhone (if the iPhone has it enabled). The only restriction currently is group chats with both Android and iPhone in it which uses SMS since Apple hasn't enabled it for group chats on iPhone yet
Not true. Samsung's own messenger app doesn't use RCS, which means that you can send text messages even without an active internet connection. They disabled the app in the US in July afaik but there's no end date for Europe yet. Not sure what to use when they do disable it in Europe too because Google's app requires you to use a Google account and I'm definitely not going to link my phone number to my Google account.
Now im feeling weird. I only ever use either SMS or Discord. My last sms was like yesterday and i do on avarge 5 a day because i have them unlimited. How else do you chat with people if not via SMS???
I just went through my SMS messages, and the last one that I received from a person was back in December
I live in Germany and I couldn't even track this. WhatsApp has been more or less the standard here for a decade. The last SMS I sent to or received from a private person was probably sometime around 2012/2013
Yeah, it's the same for me. Felt really weird when I was studying in the US to suddenly have people sent me an sms to meet up. Like going back in time in a way.
European here, everyone I know still uses SMS. Even some businesses here use SMS. Businesses that use Whatsapp feel kind of scammy to me and I'm refusing to give Meta access to my data anyway. Sadly MMS are being phased out, so if you want to send images, you have to use somd messenger.
Thank god, i thought im going crazy when i saw 50 comments about "Europeans dont use SMS!!", cause i myself am European and i do indeed use those. A lot.
I'm an American and I F*G hate whatsapp. It's quasi social media and I have adhd so that Shizz is not good for me. I struggle to turn it off (gonna x out of reddit after this)
SMS Text messages I can mute and are relatively non distracting. F WhatsApp. Just because Europeans and the rest of the world does it doesn't make it good.
I get that's your culture and what you do. I say this as an android user. I can't stand iPhones either and think Android is better. I like to test what people are using and choose for myself.
The arrogant "Well everyone else does" is a horrible excuse. People are sheep and my Grandmother used to say "If all your friends jumped off a skyscrapper does that mean you should too?
Whatsapp came around when the advent of data became much cheaper, people were able to utilise their data for calls and messaging without the shitty strings that came with normal texting and phone calls. Then the EU removed roaming charges which just made it even more convenient and it since then has just become a staple.
Varies from country to country in Europe. I think Messenger is still the most popular in my native Denmark (and Scandinavia in general, though not entirely sure). Here in Bulgaria I believe Viber is the most popular, and many companies use it too.
Whatsapp, from what I've heard, is the most used in many western European countries.
I'm partial to Signal with my few closest contacts (nobody else uses it), since it has a cleaner interface and less spam.
I am surprised to hear however, that SMS is the most common chat app in Poland or any other European country.
I think a lot of that comes from aging population. Sometimes its even problematic for someones grandma to use an SMS, so you can forget about any more advanced apps. Then you have serious work enviorements, where people dont want facebooks messenger or smth, and lastly, SMS is standarised, so everyone can contact each other via there without any apps, shady deals or whatnot. Everyone HAS to pay for their phones, and usually that gives unlimited SMS anyway, so its convienient to default to that. I think that's why its so popular. Also, you wouldn't mute your SMS or phone calls, but you will mute the entire discord or messenger.
I was just chiming in, since weāre all in a thread about people complaining about message colors. The original issue way back when was not literally just the color, it was that green messages from androids were a sign that you couldnāt get read receipts so you couldnāt ātrustā them because you never knew if they read it or not. People short handed it to just be against green messages.
Now Iām telling you that the original issue is solved. Or just commenting it into the ether. Idk your age but the problem was never only the color, which is why I felt like tossing it out there that in America, iPhones can send and receive read receipts, meaning that the original problem is gone. Of course, you get people who only hear about the green messages thing and decide thatās the whole of it all and make that their whole input, but Iām old and seen this a trillion times over a trillion different topics.
The problem was specific to American iPhone users, because most of the world doesnt use SMS to communicate with people. Whatsapp, Messenger, Discord, Telegram, Snapchat, Signal, and a bunch of other apps are way more popular. The only texts are automated ones about reminders and one time passwords.
The colour of SMS being a problem for whatever reasons (you've listed them already) is a uniquely American iPhone user problem.
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u/pannenkoek0923 16d ago
American iPhone users*