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Apple Argues iMessage Isn't Popular Enough in the EU to Be Regulated
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https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/europe - 33.83%
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-states-of-america - 56.93%
Yeah, the difference is large, but to say that over 1/3 of all smartphone users having an iPhone is a small share is laughable.
For that we have GDPR in place.
But yeah, privacy otherwise probably is not a number 1 thing in the Europe, because otherwise there would not be so many Chinese brands popular.
But honestly TikTok is among the most popular apps in the US despite it being banned. Does this mean Americans does not like privacy?
Any reason why? It is end to end encrypted. They can't see your data or anyone else's.
Never said "small share". Only that Android is a majority in the Europe. And that claim is true and you just confirmed it.
I don't use any service related to Meta because I dislike the company/owner.
I still don't get the huge success of WhatsApp. Doesn't owning an Android device imply that you have a Google account and so the access to the many communication apps Google already offer (I suppose some of them are even already installed)? Or, at least, that was the scenario at the beginning of the Android era.
Granted, Google illogically and confusingly replaced/killed its own services many times in the past which didn't help its diffusion. Still, what do the users do? They install a third party app/service, mostly ignoring what they already have under the nose.
The saddest part is that those weirdos like me aren't immune to Meta tentacles even without touching their apps/services. My personal informations are surely saved in friends' contact books, which are accessible by Meta and thus Meta knows about me...
I still don't get the huge success of WhatsApp. Doesn't owning an Android device imply that you have a Google account and so the access to the many communication apps Google already offer (I suppose some of them are even already installed)? Or, at least, that was the scenario at the beginning of the Android era.
Granted, Google illogically and confusingly replaced/killed its own services many times in the past which didn't help its diffusion. Still, what do the users do? They install a third party app/service, mostly ignoring what they already have under the nose.
The saddest part is that those weirdos like me aren't immune to Meta tentacles even without touching their apps/services. My personal informations are surely saved in friends' contact books, which are accessible by Meta and thus Meta knows about me...
Probably out of principle to not support or patronise a company they dislike.
And where I said it is?
My point still stands and the sourced article talks about UK which post I responded to talked about.
I am not in the US, but I suspect there are clusters of people who all have iPhones depending on age groups, colleges, wealth level, etc.
Maybe some Us posters can confirm …
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It's easy, WhatsApp is just a really good comms app and has been so from the beginning. Imagine that people paid to use it, and it still got worldwide traction.
And as you discovered yourself, Google royally messed up in this area. They killed Google Talk and its Gmail integration, which was brilliant and highly useful, and replaced it with a string of failing apps that were killed one after the other, leaving the field completely free for WhatsApp to dominate as the cross-platform app.
Like most, I am not happy that it's been bought by Facebook and I definitely don't like the harvesting of the contacts list, it's of course bad for privacy and I don't want to have anything to do with Facebook/Meta (or Tiktok for that matter).
But I can't give up WhatsApp because that's what everyone else here uses. Even if I were to become a complete hermit myself, there's stuff like my kids' teachers and their after-school clubs/activities etc., so really, not possible...
I'm just curious as to what European companies YOU feel are meaningfully competitive to U.S. or Asian companies in the tech segments such as operating systems, social media/messaging and smartphones (i.e., basically what we are talking about here)?
Given that Europe is more than twice the size (population) of the U.S., do you honestly feel there is enough tech competition coming from European companies?
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That's the thing about monopolies: Either you break them when you see them, regardless of reason. Or you don't do anything about it at all.
I fully approve of breaking up these money-hungry companies that would sacrifice anything they could if they knew they would get away with it. F*** em'.
I had stated in my post that the information was from Statcounter.
But what they have under the nose is not a consistently great experience, and this is why third party apps like WhatsApp became so popular. As long as communication between iPhones and Androids will be as poor and cumbersome as it is now, people will not use first-party app to communicate with their friends and family (at least outside of the US). I have an iPhone and don't see myself moving to Android anytime soon, but why on earth would I want to use iMessage to communicate even with one Android friend? The SMS experience is poor, lacks many basic features that you'll find on WhatsApp, and is not secure. As an iPhone user, my communications with Android phones is more secure through a third party app than with Apple's native app, which is a shame.
When Apple will be willing to make cross-platform communication a better experience, I think more people will consider moving to their native messaging app.
No doubt that Europe is too highly regulated to show a huge amount of innovation, but there's some - without doing any research Spotify and Linux come to mind...
But don't forget that all those US tech giants have lots and lots of R&D in Europe.
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The real news story here, is how much of a failure iMessage is outside of the USA (UK person here btw).
Everyone uses WhatsApp - or Telegram if you’re in Eastern Europe.
iMessage is absolutely not seen as a status symbol here.
Literally no one cares about it. The blue green bubble marketing that apple does is only relevant in the USA.
I don’t use WhatsApp and people think I’m weird / deliberately being annoying as it’s so ubiquitous.
In the end, I suspect that apple will lose this argument in the EU anyway.
Others on this thread have explained as to why more eloquently than I ever could
Everyone uses WhatsApp - or Telegram if you’re in Eastern Europe.
iMessage is absolutely not seen as a status symbol here.
Literally no one cares about it. The blue green bubble marketing that apple does is only relevant in the USA.
I don’t use WhatsApp and people think I’m weird / deliberately being annoying as it’s so ubiquitous.
In the end, I suspect that apple will lose this argument in the EU anyway.
Others on this thread have explained as to why more eloquently than I ever could
iMessage is a pretty mediocre messaging application in my view. Its interface is clunky and cluttered, it really struggles if you have poor reception or lose reception, listening to voice messages is a chore, for some reason it insists that a picture and a comment on that picture need to be separate messages and and and.
It has two things going for it:
1) It's already on your device and for some reason some people, particularly in the US, seem to really struggle installing messaging apps. Not any app, just messaging apps.
2) The real benefit is that it synchronises really well across your Apple devices, so if you have a Watch and/or a Mac iMessage does offer additional functionality that you may be better than what you get with WhatsApp or Signal, if that functionality exists in the first place (Apple Watch no longer being supported by a lot of services).
But that really is it. Personal preference is valid and doesn't have to be empirical, but beyond (2) I really can't think of any good reasons why iMessage would offer a "far better" experience, particularly when no one really uses SMS anymore in Europe.
It's Google to blame, then. And it seems they didn't learn from their mistakes.
TikTok: another success mystery to me...
How sad.
I had to install and maintain a Nextcloud instance with Talk app in order to have a communication tool with my relatives. Moreover I have purchased/installed Threema and basically never used it because when I mention it I'm told: Tree...what?!...
Were they on the lists you provided? I didn't get that far if they were.
Apart from SAP and Ericsson, never heard of those.
How so? I can't think of a lot of must-have features that are only offered with iMessages (and I'm not talking about better stickers).
Cross-platform interaction is the single most important feature for a communication app IMO, and this is where iMessages is a very poor experience. I don't care if Apple offers more features to iPhone users, but it should still improve the experience for interactions with green bubbles if it wants people outside of the US to adopt it.
They were not. Is that a problem that I provided another companies matching your exact criteria?
Well, I blame Google. All they had to do was not kill GTalk.
With my relatives it's easy, Signal. Whenever I can convince someone to use Signal, I do. For the rest of the world, it's WhatsApp.
I built a holiday house a couple of years ago and 100% of the architects/contractors/tradesmen/etc that worked there used WhatsApp and nothing else. That's how prevalent it is. Some people here in the neighbourhood use it even as social media, with the "status" feature, if you can believe it, like a discount Instagram.
I was highlighting that the lists you originally provided yourself didn't contain anything of substance?