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Android isn't cool with teenagers, and that's a big problem
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this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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Why are iPhones so popular in the US compared to Europe? Is it a peer pressure kind of thing? Or simply status? The difference seems to be pretty substantial and I don't think it can be explained by user experience alone.
iPhones have a 58% (US) vs 26% (EU) market share.
I think it has to do with the messagin app. For some reason in the us it's still common to use plain sms messages, which on an iPhone get translated to the blue bubble, but when sent to an android become the infamous green bubble.
This is however not the case in the EU bc sms messages were still expensive enoughfuring that time that when whatsapp released, everyone did the switch so as to not to pay the sms fees, and now, even if sms are basically free, everyone uses whatsapp as the default messaging app.
And as we know on whatsapp there's no differentiation of anything regarding the device you are sending messages to, so no constant reminder of "this guy had an android".
Just my 2 cents on why this could be.
The interesting thing is that the green/blue bubble thing is only infamous in the US.
As you say, outside the US, people use messaging apps like whatsapp or wechat.
The blue bubbles mean you’re using iMessage, which is encrypted. You don’t have to download a separate app owned by Facebook which makes texting iPhone to iPhone so much better.
In the US most carriers (and certainly the big 3) support end-to-end encryption via RCS. Though of course, Apple won't support the Diffie-Helman exchange outside of iMessage or anything RCS at all.
…which you need to install Google or Samsung messages to take advantage of, so it’s the same thing.
Until all phones use the same protocols in their stock messages app, SMS will still be used to send between the different platforms.
RCS is a standard and is application and even operating system agnostic. Anyone, including applications outside of Android can support it.
iMessage is not a standard and certainly not agnostic.
Ok, well I still don’t want to install another app to use it so I guess we’re stuck.
What really needs to happen is for all the phone makers agree to use the same protocols (and I really don’t care which) so we can all have end-to-end encryption by default.
That's the thing. Essentially everyone has agreed, except for Apple. This includes 12 phone manufacturers and at least 55 operators world-wide.
Even Microsoft since Windows 10 supports RCS in the Your Phone app, so if you're using a Windows desktop or laptop, even it supports RCS.
Everybody has agreed that the default messaging app is Whatsapp over here. I haven't seen anybody use anything else for texting in ages, on either platform.
I don't think you guys realize how bizarre this conversation sounds to me.
Everyone knows, because anytime anyone talks about SMS/MMS/RCS somebody comes in to remind people that it's mostly a US thing. SMS/MMS started to become cheap in the early 00s in most of the US (and unlimited free for users of the same carrier was common) and as carriers raced to compete by the late 00s, unlimited SMS/MMS was commonly free in the US, even to users outside their own carrier. All carriers had interoperability with SMS/MMS already. Even iMessage falls back to SMS/MMS outside of iMessage. It is pretty logical that SMS/MMS became what most people used in the US.
Elsewhere, Whatsapp came out when much of the rest of the world was still paying for the number of text messages sent or they could use a miniscule amount of their data and use something else.
We know. It always comes up.
I'm not surprised, that is a very strange arrangement and the conversation sounds nuts from the outside looking in.
Maybe start caveating it with "for those of us in North America" or something. From over here it really sounds like you guys are mashing random keys on your keyboard.
For the record, while SMS still being paid above a certain number was a factor, we were already vastly defaulting to messaging apps before Whatsapp took over. It wasn't rare to give people your MSN Messenger info rather than your phone number even during the feature phone era. Texting was always more of a commercial thing and for finding people in the street rather than a thing to have long chats.
And the reason why people were defaulting to MSN Messenger was... Because SMS weren't free. The same thing was happening in the USA/Canada at that point in time, nothing exceptional about Europe. Free SMS reversed that trend in one place, the change to phone plans didn't happen quickly enough in the other place and a third party app won, that's all.
What's nice about SMS is that it will always work as soon as there's a signal and no matter what phone people have, no need to install multiple third party apps to cater to the needs of those who decide to go against the flow and use something else, you boot your phone for the first time and it's ready to send messages no matter the phone, simple as that.
Whatsapp is preinstalled on every phone you buy here (including iPhones, AFAIK, but maybe that's a sync thing? I don't know, I haven't seen an iPhone in ages). So it's pretty comparable these days.
For what it's worth, the timeline shift isn't just due to the SMS pricing changes. I think the general introduction of mobile telephony was also pretty staggered. I remember US-based media depicting the idea of a teen having long SMS conversations before I or anybody I knew had a feature phone. MSN dominance wasn't caused by expensive text messaging, it predates text messaging altogether, at least for mainstream users.
SMS is definitely a solid fallback for emergency services, though. It definitely retains use, even if it's mostly notifications from governments and companies.
I meant MSN still being dominant even after cellphones offered the capacity to chat via text. WhatsApp was introduced in 2009, the first iPhone was introduced to the market two years prior, that's a whole lot of time where text communication on cellphones was done via SMS.
Sure, and mainstream texting predates the iPhone by several years. And the iPhone wasn't an instant hit over here, either. Too expensive, both the hardware and the data plans. Hell, I already had a full time job by then and even being a techhead I waited several generations and only got an iPod Touch because getting the GSM version seemed like a waste of a LOT of money just to get access to the App Store.
But still, MSN's dominance predates texting and it just kept that role while texting was a separate way to catch up with people on the go. And yeah, it was expensive, or at least paid piecemeal, so people went as far as using their phones as beepers, giving each other little deliberately missed calls to point them towards other messaging apps or social media. Because social media also happened, and it also predates smartphones, and it kinda took over for MSN Messenger. By the time Android phones got big over here, let alone data plans or SMS became the norm, those became the default.
So yeah, the economics of it all drove the adoption, along with companies being more regional (no ICQ or AOL over here, either), but it's more of a series of mismatches in the timeline, rather than a direct line from SMS pricing to Whatsapp. There are multiple different tangents along the way, and they're different in different places.
I mean, this is a thread about US phone use.
It's not, though? It's an article on an Android-focused site about the state of Android extrapolating global trends from US stats.
I guess that makes it about US phone use in that "you shouldn't extrapolate global trends from US phone use" is a relevant point about it.
Second sentence in the article:
The article is US centric and mentions studies and the market in the US all over the article. The article even talks about RCS and the issue there.
This is a strange conversation indeed but I don't think it is for the reason you think it is.
Fair enough, I suppose. It's still a very culturally specific, bizarre-sounding controversy from outside the US. It's not a surprise that people would point that out when Americans get stuck in heated debates about it.
I hear ya. Yeah I don’t see why they couldn’t incorporate RCS to fall back on instead of SMS. They could even keep iMessage and everything would be better for everyone.
No, which Apple would have to integrate into iMessage.
Literally the point. Everyone is waiting for Apple, EU is considering forcing them (again.)
I really hope they won't, because it's very bad for privacy.
It's fantastic for security, but a privacy disaster.
Stupid question, but does imessage allow you to record messages, post videos, pictures, gifs, attach files, hold polls, start groups, etc?
Or is it still mainly an sms based thing?
Yes it does
off topic, by any chance are you using Jerboa? ses like your comments is missing some spaces and I suspect it might be a bug with the app
It is a bug with Jerboa, it don't play nice with autocomplete / autocorrect underlines.
Yes! Wow it has to do with the app? I was going crazy, yes when I delete a word it shifts back and joind with the last word, it drives me nuts, are they planning on fixing it? Or do you recommend me another app?
While other commenters are correct about the marketing in some aspects. As a parent of teenagers I will say if they don't have an iPhone they will be mocked relentlessly. The whole bubble color thing is real. They think androids are for poor people even though androids have a much larger range of price. This isn't a "my kids" thing. This is a "everyone in school thinks" thing.
God help me when they get their next upgrade and suddenly my chargers start going missing because "someone stole" theirs...
So it boils down to classism among youths and in schools?
adults participate in it
No, no, blame the children.
We, the current adults, are not at fault for the situation. It's others. Older adults, or the young people. It's only us who is enlightened, everyone else is fucking stupid.
this is the same excuse i hear for people circumcising their kids.
are us people so weak to peer pressure?
Apple is headquartered in America and used a lot of marketing with celebrities, musicians, trendsetters etc.
Samsung is really popular in Asia. There's something to be said for homefield advantage.
What's the carrier situation like in the EU? Do they market the iPhone aggressively in Europe? I'd suspect both of those may have some influence on the difference, but I'm as interested as you in what's affecting the differences in adoption between both regions.
RCS has failed to take over the market, creating a strong preference for iMessage. Additionally, iPhones just work. The curated App Store means far less malware and buggy crap apps. Pile on the social aspects and few people under 25 are going for iPhones.
I don't know what RCS even is.
We all just use Whatsapp here, both on iPhone and Android. If you bought an iPhone for some reason and tried to text people through iMessage you'd get laughed out of the room.
Also, holy crap, how long has it been since you looked at the Play Store? Is that narrative about Android still running in the US? I legitimately hadn't heard that one in years.
It's gotten better over the years, but the stats don't lie. Play Store has higher incidence of shady apps or outright malware. Some of this is due to their policies, some of it because of how Android apps work. And I work in information security, so I'm quite familiar with the state of things. RCS was proposed as a replacement for SMS, to correct some deficiencies and modernize it overall. In the US, it ended up getting fragmented due to carrier differences and Google tacking on patents and licensing encumbrances that harmed adoption. In the EU yeah, everyone just uses 3rd party platforms, so it's not a problem there.
The ecosystem is very different and there's definitely a more open platform on Google's side still, but the perception that Play is catching up to the iPhone App Store has not been a thing around here for ages. I mean, discovery is borked across the board on both at this point, and breaking out with new content through placement is a nonstarter.
And hell no, nobody uses "third party platforms". They use the Play Store. Nobody is in Samsung or Amazon's weirdo alternatives. Those are not a thing, except for the five apps Samsung insists on making you update that way for some reason. It's Play or nothing. If you're developing phone apps and you're not on the Play Store you're dead. I haven't spoken to a mobile developer that was targeting anything but the App Story and the Play Store... ever.
I thought I knew how that worked in the US, but maybe you're talking about something different here.
3rd party platforms as in messaging services, not apps stores.
Ah, got it. I thought you were still talking about the Play Store there. It's telling that I didn't even categorize Whatsapp that way instinctively, though.
I think maybe because I also don't think of SMS as a "first party" thing, since it's a pre-existing standard, not an Apple or Google thing at all. In my mind SMS is a public service thing, like AM radio, and messaging is a completely different application.
It probably shows how successfully Apple appropriated it in the US, which I admit I keep forgetting.
You sound like every cringe teenager worried about the status of blue or green messages. Cringe bro. Just absolutely cringe.
Frankly I don't care. I use a mixture of both ecosystems. I'm not going to deny reality either and pretend that the average American in their target demographics doesn't. I find it disappointing that as soon as anyone points out something someone else doesn't like others go straight to attacking the person and not the point. The real cringe is taking the sides of companies that don't care about you beyond the revenue you bring them.
but no revanced
That doesn't explain the difference in market share. Seems like there are cultural differences.
It might be, and given the States' rather unique culture I have a feeling it's a big contributor other factors notwithstanding.
just like any android phone...