iOS/iPhones are the majority of phones in Canada and the US (~60%). However, if you take the upper half of household incomes that number skyrockets to 80-90%. Comparatively, in the UK it's 50/50. In the rest of europe android mostly has a 60-75% market share (tends to drift more towards android the more eastern you go - signalling wealth has a lot to do with it).

The reasons why are varied (everything from wealth signalling to switching being a pain and iphone mostly had a first mover advantage for quality and availability for the first several years), but it's only in the last two years that I've seen people start to use multi-platform chat apps here. Most of my peer group with other parents all default to imessage group chats for sharing photos, stories of our kids.

I am also starting to notice a loosening on apple's services. Spotify is used by more people than Apple music even amungst the apple households I know.

WhatsApp never caught on in the US since cell phones and SMS were a great deal for keeping in touch. By the time WhatsApp arrived US carriers were not raping their customers for phone calls or SMS messages (in the early days of cell phones they were - be very careful responding as the state of the world has changed many times over the years and so it is quite possible you remember a time where your country was better than the US for reasons that are no longer true!). Note in particular calls and SMS to a different state is included, and typically Canada is included as well. As such we never developed the WhatsApp habbit as it didn't give us anything.

Yes. WhatsApp isn't nearly as popular in the US as in many other countries.

Idk what the stats are on this, but anecdotally, all my friends use FB Messenger if they want cross-platform group chat, but that's slowly changing to some fragmented list of alternatives. And usually it's not for semi-important things like get-together plans.

This. In 98% of all cases I get away with only having telegram (no phone number even) most people have one or multiple IMs

100%.

iMessage is THE number one thing selling iphones these days, and has been for a long time.

I see this line of thinking online a lot, with people mentioning kids are excluded because they have green bubbles as if it’s some sort of highly superficial exclusion based on only wanting to talk to Apple users.

The main issue is that including a non-iMessage user changes the protocol of the group chat from iMessage to SMS and SMS can basically make group chats unusable.

I also don’t like that kids who don’t have an iPhone can’t participate in iMessage group chats, but when we make out like it’s just kids being cruel and not an actual functional incentive to not include those kids then we are losing sight of where the pressure should be applied.

it's just a new version of "preps don't hang out with goths"

Adults too

I don't think seamless integration with MMS is enough to outweigh being different/not having "the real thing" or the full experience in the eyes of a young teenager. This reads as the HN version of the "but we have iMessage at home" meme (I mean this humourously, not as snark).

Even that has been fixed by now in my chats with android friends. The only reason to display green bubbles anymore is to indicate lack of E2EE. But that will be coming to RCS interop soon as well.

In theory it's ok. In practice, MMS group chats are broken. It's not even an iPhone thing, as evident in Android-dominated areas still relying on WhatsApp instead.

Non-iMessage chats are also segregated by color, a visual affordance that identifies you as a member of the non-Apple outgroup. The other.

iMessage chats also include rich media that is either degraded in MMS (photos, videos unless you have RCS support) or just doesn't exist (like multiplayer games, invites, apple cash, etc).

This may not seem like a big deal to you, but if you remember what it's like to be a kid, you should get it. The smallest friction can be a reason to exclude someone socially.