Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Other how popular is iMessage in your home country?
- Thread starter HALE101
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Privacy issues aside WhatsApp is a much richer (IMO) experience than iMessage. It feels more customisable with different chat backgrounds rather than sterile white, replying to individual messages is much slicker than in iMessage (just swipe and type), group chats give participants different colours to help distinguish them, voice notes are much easier to record and send…
Rightly or wrongly I think a lot of people value that kind of stuff over the privacy concerns.
Rightly or wrongly I think a lot of people value that kind of stuff over the privacy concerns.
If I may speculate, based on how things looked to me in Europe:
The first iPhones were interesting, but US-centric in their reliance on wifi and 2G, which was perceived as outdated compared to what Europeans were used to with their Nokias and Sony-Ericssons. The speed only really caught up two years later with the 3GS, and by that time Android had already entered the market in full force. A bit of nationalist pride/resistance may also have been a factor. Overall this meant that the iPhone never got the critical mass it had in the US.
Of course, neither iMessage nor WhatsApp existed yet. But WhatsApp came first and quickly supported all major mobile platforms, so it was readily adopted in the mixed European market. By the time iMessage appeared in 2011 it was largely pointless in Europe.
And I think this continues to this day. The iPhone's ability to use iMessage is far less valuable in Europe (despite EU iPhone-prices being substantially higher than in the US), so there is little "need" to get an iPhone over an Android.
This, exactly this. I generally use the built in message app on my iPhone and don't care whether it goes via iMessage or sms.
I'm in the UK.
iPhone has a 20 percent share in the global smartphone market. If Android dominates the market than it's hard to consider iMessage to be "popular". Having lived in both Europe and Asia for the last 10 years I hardly know anyone using iMessage. 90% of my friends/coworkers from Europe use Android phones. In Japan Apple has almost half of smartphone market - even so, most people use LINE app for communication.
Actually thinking about it, I do use iMessage more than I first thought. I always use it for messages between me and my wife and theres a few friends and relatives I occasionally use iMessage with, but for group chats it’s WhatsApp.
I think the last data confirmed there are 2bn WhatsApp users globally and 1.3bn iMessage. I can see why WhatsApp is so popular in my part of the world and coincidentally in this thread too.
It'd be interesting to know if those 1.3bn iMessage users are just comprised of everyone who owns an iPhone and has occasionally sent a iMessage or if that's active users?
USA here, everyone I know uses iMessage except a handful of my contacts which I just SMS through iMessage. A few of my friends use Signal but not many..
It’s a common misconception that Telegram is somehow ‘safer’ than WhatsApp. WhatsApp has end-to-end encryption by default, Telegram does not. Signal is of course the best one (for the paranoid ones 😉).
I’m Croatian, living in Spain. In both Croatia and Spain basically everyone uses WhatsApp, regardless of having an iPhone or not. I’d say the main reason is that there are many Android users (most of my friends are!), and carriers are still very often charging for the SMS, so people don’t want to pay for a classic SMS if they could send a message for free on apps like WhatsApp.
I occasionally use iMessage with my husband, but we still use WhatsApp more than 95% of the time.
I occasionally use iMessage with my husband, but we still use WhatsApp more than 95% of the time.
After reading the first page, I find it interesting the users mentioned their friends use Facebook Messenger and not WhatsApp in Canada.
I'm in Canada and WhatsApp is the main messaging app with only one friend owning an iPhone, and we communicate via WhatsApp or SMS.
So to answer the OP's question, iMessage is not popular amongst my circle, because 9/10 friends own an Android device.
I'm in Canada and WhatsApp is the main messaging app with only one friend owning an iPhone, and we communicate via WhatsApp or SMS.
So to answer the OP's question, iMessage is not popular amongst my circle, because 9/10 friends own an Android device.
Another Canadian here ( out west ) and going through my contact list, I talk to 3 people on iMessage ( 2 family members in Edmonton and a friend in Minnesota, about 20 friends on crackbook messenger, and everyone else is WA especially work related and people I know outside of Canada/US.
They hurt my eyes 😂 iMessage is the bees knees in Aus.
Green bubbles also remind me of the green tint I use to have on my 12 pro max. 🤮😂
It was 50:50 for me (when I used to live in oz).
According to this site, iOS has about 45% of the market:
Australia: smartphone OS market share 2024 | Statista
As of March 2024, Android operating systems for smartphones held a market share of 53.4 percent in Australia.
www.statista.com