Everybody use WhatsApp here (east of the Atlantic Ocean,) even on iPhones, because you never know which kind of phone all your friends are using. Apple and Android could stop developing their messaging apps and nobody would notice. SMSes are only for banks and spam.

everyone uses whatsapp, except those using telegram or facebook messenger.

None of these are significant in my country of almost 30m people. You are in a bubble.

Given that iMessage has 1.3 billion active monthly users, WhatsApp has 2 billion and Facebook Messenger with 3, I don’t believe they are the one living in a bubble.

Not everyone and as soon as you go to another country they are using another messenger so unless you want to never communicate with them again you will have both installed

Lucky you, I still have contacts using Viber

Right, forgot to list that one

Signal?

It's the same here in Japan: everyone uses LINE messenger. SMS is pretty much never used because it's considered a privacy violation; only delivery companies and banks and the like use it (and spammers, like you said). Nobody cares about iMessage's colored bubbles.

But it's never "everyone", there's always someone using something else in some part of the word so end result everyone has 5 different apps.

No, in Japan, it really is everyone. All kinds of commercial entities also use LINE to communicate with customers even.

Yes, if you want to talk to people in other parts of the world, you'll need a different app for that, because different parts of the world tend to use different apps (e.g., Chinese all use WeChat, Europeans seem to use WhatsApp, etc.). If you just want to talk to people in Japan, LINE is all you need. (Taiwan too, I think)

> If you just want to talk to people in Japan, LINE is all you need.

I talk to them on Facebook Messenger and Instagram personally. Which means "people in Japan" have them installed also. So you get my drift :)

One messenger is never "all you need" unless you pick your friends based on what app they use.

>I talk to them on Facebook Messenger and Instagram personally. Which means "people in Japan" have them installed also. So you get my drift :)

No, I don't.

Those people only have them to talk to you, because you're not in Japan and don't use LINE.

People in Japan who don't have foreign friends don't have this issue.

(Also, Instagram is not a messaging app. Messenger is.)

> People in Japan who don't have foreign friends, don't do business with anyone abroad, never travel abroad, ...

FTFY

> Those people only have them to talk to you

Nah, any single one of them has many more friends outside of Japan than I have friends in Japan. People living on an island with the most powerful passport in the world love to travel, breaking news.

> because you're not in Japan and don't use LINE.

It's true for all of the world except Japan :)

> (Also, Instagram is not a messaging app. Messenger is.)

That's just false. After it's stopped being about photos, it's just a messaging app for me and countless other people who don't care about its tiktok-mimicking reels and other drivel. It's actually very decent at being just a messenger.

I've been on Android for more than a decade, and I still don't know what I'm "supposed" to be using. I have switched out that stuff for third party apps a few years back. Was a disaster zone, I'm sure it still is.

I hate to beat a dead horse but its been an issue even before Android. I had gmail in the inital invite-only launch back in 2004. They added their first real chat feature into gmail (back when gmail was the only google service you needed an account for) in 2006, 2 years before Android.

I don't even know what they call that chat-inside-gmail these days. Talk? Chat? I remember it getting merged with Hangouts eventually and then un-merged. Or was that Voice?

I was on Voice too as GrandCentral back before Google bought them. The mp3 ringback functionality which was the first feature lost in the purchase.

Ended up reminiscing a bit there but its been a crazy ride in the Google sphere.

That was google "Buzz" - a very simple XMPP based chat app, that it really wouldn't have hurt to hold on to. Last I heard it was merged into hangouts yeah, but hopefully it should still work with standalone XMPP clients ...

They've more or less got it down to Messages (SMS and RCS) and Gmail chat.

I don't understand the deep misguidedness of your question.

You've been on Android for decade, keep using what you've been using and you like. When did people become too dumb to choose a thing they like and started demanding socialism?

Some of the ones that I've liked have literally disappeared, or at least become practically unmaintained (eg, Google Voice).

Not to mention fairly nice features like SMS and Hangouts integration that were ripped out into separate apps again.

It has been a confusing mess.

>started demanding socialism

Tf is this supposed to mean in this context?

Socialism has started being adopted as a synonym for "something I don't like and/or don't understand". It would be funny if the word didn't have an existing meaning.

> "something I don't like and/or don't understand"

In particular "something I have no need for but lots of other people do but I don't care about them"

The sad thing is that they were in a good position with this with Google Talk. But they used extremely creative tactics to reposition themselves into a complete mess.

It has all distilled down to RCS Messages and other messenger apps so stop worrying about what Google is doing and start using whichever app your family and friends are on.