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Only the EU can save Android in the US now (www.androidauthority.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/android@lemdro.id
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TL;DR: Apple dominates the US smartphone market, but EU regulations may offer Android a chance for resurgence by enforcing messaging interoperability and standardizing hardware features.

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[–] 11 points 3 years ago (1 child)

Fragmentation is a huge problem for everything else. What percentage of Android users have any particular one of those apps you listed?

WhatApp is installed on little bit under 100% among all Android phones and iPhones in most EU countries and should the EU actually tackle messenger interoperability, iMessage is definitively not the main target. The most die-hard Apple fans I know use iMessage for a little bit when new features were introduced. Then they go back to WhatsApp like everybody else.

To be clear: I'm not an advocate of WhatApp here, I'm merely explaining that the EU does not care at all about Apple's chat service nobody in the EU uses. Should any legislation even affect iMessage, it'll be more coincidental, not targeted at it.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I don't know about the rest of the world but in the UK text messages used to cost 10p for each one you send. Multimedia messages were like 40p. Really expensive. WhatsApp came about and made both of these free. The rest is history.

    Ironically, SMS are generally free these days but nobody obviously uses them. My SMS app is just full of OTP codes being sent to me.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)

    This seems to have happened in most of the world. The US still sticks to SMS because it is free since before chat apps became a thing. SMS was a terrible experience because you would pay per message thanks to carriers’ greed. It didn’t keep up with the demand for constant communication.

    Nowadays in Brazil SMS is also free, but by the point they did that, WhatsApp had already become ubiquitous, and had much better features such as sending location, consistent experience with features over different devices, group chats with moderation, voice messages, free voice calls to any user over the world, etc., besides being built from scratch as an SMS substitute (would simply use your mobile number). No one would willingly go back to SMS.

    Seems like only some Asian countries defaulted to a different app such as Kakao Talk.

    There was Kik Messenger back then but it was more like an anonymous chat app.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    You're from Brazil? I just want to say, if English is not your native language you'd have a hard time convincing me it isn't.

    SMS is the same in the UK these days. Free. MMS isn't though. They still like to scam the older users who know no better.

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