IMHO the “blue bubble exceptionalism” is the elephant in the room.
I was thinking that this is mainly a US thing and then saw that the article talks about the US. Android is still more common in the rest of the world.
Yeah we Americans miss out on a lot that the rest of the civilized world has…
Cute that you are including the US in the civilised world
We aren’t third-world yet, but if we can’t excise the political cancer soon, we will be.
This is 100% a US thing
I find it curious why this is downvoted?
IOS is a clear market leader overall in USA with 57% market share according to statcounter:
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-states-of-america/
It’s not hard to imagine that could be even more for teenagers, that are more vulnerable about being socially left out.
And yes I too find that problematic, because Apple is a control freak company, that want’s to decide what you can do with your phone. Resulting in insanity early on, that you couldn’t buy the most popular newspapers in Denmark through the App store. Because they had content Apple didn’t agree with!!!
How the fuck that shitshow of a company ever became so popular is beyond me, no matter how “good” their claimed quality is.I don’t know, I used to use Nokia as teenager… Things tend to change quite radically over years
Not really, the disruption the iPhone caused is quite unique, and was in a somewhat immature market. As the market matures, things tend to settle to a more (semi) permanent state.
It’s absolutely blue bubble exceptionalism and both Apple and Google are to blame. Google couldn’t focus on a single messaging strategy and has created and destroyed half a dozen workable cross-platform messaging solutions. Meanwhile, Apple did and pushed iPhone users into its walled garden while Europeans turned to Whatsapp which has the virtue of being multi-platform but it’s owned by Meta which has its own set of problems.
RCS might’ve worked out if Google had just cut the carriers out from the beginning. It’s not even that great of a protocol but it’s probably the only one likely to supplant SMS as the lowest common denominator if Google gets its way with regulators and forces Apple to play along. It doesn’t benefit Apple to bother until they’re forced to.
Blackberry used to be all the rage with teenagers too.
Haha yes BBM messenger!
Blackberry was all the rage in business. I have never seen anything official about it being the rage among teens.
Nokia phones were in Europe, because using the Nokia writing system for SMS was blazing fast compared to the competition.
But at that time USA didn’t have SMS AFAIK.Blackberry was huge in the teen age group in the UK at least. BBM being the big selling point.
OK the only place I really heard it was the “rave”, was among politicians.
I don’t quite get how they could be so popular among teens, as they were quite expensive for a phone for the time.
