SMS Is way more common I guess in the US because you can text anyone across the US, whereas before EU carriers may have charged more for intra-EU texts?
WhatsApp became popular (in the UK) around the time when SMS was free for most. It was a huge jump over SMS because:
group chats
read receipts
worked on WiFi without a phone signal
picture / video messages
it was fast (or it certainly felt faster anyway)
From what I recall at the time, BBM was quite popular but WhatsApp won over in the end as it was cross platform. There was a big appetite to move away from SMS. WhatsApp wasn’t even free at the time, it had a small annual fee on Android or a one off installation fee on iOS and still gained popularity. It’s kind of surprising that the rest of the world seemed to make this jump at the same time but the US seems to be stuck on SMS.
There are always four decisions at play - country of origin of sender and receiver, current location of sender and receiver.
Whenever you enter a different country, you gen an automated SMS informing you of the prices of SMS, MMS, outgoing and incoming price calls per minute.
Rule of thumb used to be - SMS receiving is always free, accepting a call with local SIM card is also free. All the other combinations are usually extra if you are currently in a different country than the SIM origin.
But, now that most of EU is either in Shengen or is a partial member with contracts (like Croatia with mobile internet), you either don’t pay as much or pay no extra at all.
But, yeah, that’s probably the reason SMS never really got off.
SMS Is way more common I guess in the US because you can text anyone across the US, whereas before EU carriers may have charged more for intra-EU texts?
WhatsApp became popular (in the UK) around the time when SMS was free for most. It was a huge jump over SMS because:
From what I recall at the time, BBM was quite popular but WhatsApp won over in the end as it was cross platform. There was a big appetite to move away from SMS. WhatsApp wasn’t even free at the time, it had a small annual fee on Android or a one off installation fee on iOS and still gained popularity. It’s kind of surprising that the rest of the world seemed to make this jump at the same time but the US seems to be stuck on SMS.
There are always four decisions at play - country of origin of sender and receiver, current location of sender and receiver.
Whenever you enter a different country, you gen an automated SMS informing you of the prices of SMS, MMS, outgoing and incoming price calls per minute.
Rule of thumb used to be - SMS receiving is always free, accepting a call with local SIM card is also free. All the other combinations are usually extra if you are currently in a different country than the SIM origin.
But, now that most of EU is either in Shengen or is a partial member with contracts (like Croatia with mobile internet), you either don’t pay as much or pay no extra at all.
But, yeah, that’s probably the reason SMS never really got off.