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.
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)
> 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.
