Europe has had the benefit of not having Apple building walls through the smartphone market as much as they have here. Americans flocked to them and elected them the trend setters, and Apple's design philosophy is as aggressively closed as it can possibly be. So we have an entire generation now raised with Apple devices in hand that balk at the idea of using anything else, meanwhile Apple keeps competitors locked out of the ecosystem.
Apple has trained far too many Americans to never, ever think beyond the defaults; downloading another app to talk to people is verboten.
Europe has had a properly competitive smartphone market where all the major players are using the same open system, so none of them are setting trends that the others can't follow.