Excellent write up. I hear people ask about this all the time, why the USA defaulted towards SMS/MMS/iMessage when other parts of the world didn’t. It is not the case of now but the history of the technological development and saturation of the technology within the younger demographics that got us here naturally. We didn’t have to make a choice of which platform to migrate our friend/family groups too because we had enough of the functions we needed built into all of our phones along the last 30 years.

It doesn’t come down to what is the best platform right now, it comes down to what was the best, and easiest, platform to get all my friends and family using when my country/region/friend group/etc got smartphones. There are large swaths of the world population where their technology exposure was landline>TV>Internet cafe>smartphone. Where the beginning of their online presence was through an Internet cafe and then very soon after (within years) they had a smart phone. In that model their first interaction with instant messaging was not phone to phone but computer to computer and they used messenger/instagram/whatsapp/wechat and etc and those social networks of friends migrated with them from the Internet cafe PC as the main point of access to a Smartphone as the main point of access.