Comment by Cthulhu_
3 years ago
As a Dutch person, I'm still amazed that the US still seems to use SMS as much; mind you, our phone plans here were "you get 1000 text messages and X minutes or a bajillion megabytes of data"; that + 'free' international messaging / calls with services like Whatsapp quickly pushed people to data-only messaging like Whatsapp or maybe FB Messenger. We also have a big immigrant population that like to chat with their family wherever they may live, and international calls / text messages are stupid expensive.
I can imagine that's less of an issue in the US; do you pay extra for text messages and calls that go across state lines?
FWIW, I'm not American.
In the UK, where I am, most contracts have unlimited SMS. I think even the cheapest PAYG plans include massive bundles.
Lots of companies send out reminders by SMS because it is universally accepted. Not every customer has WhatsApp.
We do generally pay extra for international calls, though text messaging is often free (assuming you’re talking about international states. US states, of course, are all treated as the same country).
Almost all phone plans have unlimited (domestic) texting and calling and differentiate themselves with data, reliability and ”free” perks like subsidized Netflix. You really have to go out of your way to find a plan with limited texts/calls.
It's actually mostly some parts in central Europe where texting is expensive. For most parts of the world texting is quite important.
I don't understand why people on this board keep forgetting that central Europe and the US is the minority of the world population.
Everyone keeps bringing up WhatsApp. But it seems that everyone has all but forgotten that WhatsApp became so popular not because they only focused on the US market, but because they went around the globe and specifically targeted feature phones as well. I.e. they understood that their own home turf isn't enough to make a dominant chat application.
> I don't understand why people on this board keep forgetting that central Europe and the US is the minority of the world population.
Did you mean to reply to a different comment? Mine was a reply to the GP, to answer the very narrow questions he asked about the US.
The death of SMS is hardly specific to central Europe and the US. It's already thoroughly dead in most of Asia for person-to-person communication, replaced by WhatsApp/WeChat/LINE/Telegram/etc depending on country.
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Why are you people always so proud of having all your communication owned by Meta? With Meta dictating which phones you can use to communicate with others?
Where are you getting the idea from that "we" are proud of our communication being controlled by a commercial party? I'm pretty sure most people are not proud, but either poorly informed or not willing to make the trade off for more security while losing half their social network.
And yet, every time we have this conversation we get this "who cares about SMS, we have WhatsApp!" comments, like that's some kind of a good thing?
It happens in iMessage and RCS threads as well.
No, my phone plan in the US was unlimited call and text. So it was either imessage with everyone or text.
I've gotten SMS messages from iPhone users. In some Apple centric areas (rich people or people who think/want to pretend they're rich), I think iMessage is the default.
Fine by me. If they want a better experience, I have almost every messaging app on the Dutch market bridged to my Matrix server so I don't care, they'll just have to live with the lack of features if they want to chat with me (or install something like Signal).
I don't care about RCS and other ISP standards that exist to squeeze more money out of texting. I'll use Telegram/Signal/WhatsApp calling before I'll use my phone app because my subscription doesn't include free minutes (and I barely call anyway) so I've gotten the benefits of tech like WiFi calling through VoLTE for years before ISPs bothered sending their VoLTE profiles to my phone.