![]() My takeway from this was that the iMessage lockin was definitely real, not because of any social stigma but because iMessage was, at that time and place, far superior to any other well-known product for our use case. It didn't help that this happened in the fall right after some people had moved off to college and a bunch of new freshmen joined the group and within about two weeks the group ceased to exist. ![]() It wasn't worth opening up a new, clunky app just to send a meme or joke to some friends, and Slack's extremely unintuitive notification settings meant that nobody saw anyone's messages anyway. This was a complete disaster: Slack was cumbersome, intuitive, and a painful transition, and it completely killed the group chat. Of course, this meant he missed out on all the socialization aspects of this group).Įventually, we hit iMessage's 30-person limit on the number of participants in a group chat, and so we were forced to switch to Slack. (One Android users eventually showed up, but the group went with the path of least resistance and just relayed information to him separately rather than switching chat platforms. iMessage was working great for us, so we decided to stick with it and reconsider if an Android user actually wanted to join the group. People very much did not want to download a new app, make an account, and learn to use it just for one group chat. So I researched alternatives and suggested we switch over to Slack (this was before Discord got big, so Slack seemed like the best option at the time). Switching to a regular MMS group was a non-starter - MMS is slow and unreliable, administering large groups is a complete disaster, and many teens can't receive MMS messages at all because they don't have a data plan (whereas iMessage works over a Wi-Fi connection). I recognized that we could potentially be excluding people who didn't have iPhones, so I brought up the topic in the group. We never had any Android users who consistently showed up, so iMessage was an easy default. So, basically, there is no universal chat tool that you can use in the US and basically expect people to be on, except SMS/MMS (and iMessage, which basically takes the place of MMS on iPhones from a users perspective).Ī few years ago, when I was a teen in high school, I was part of a decently large group that used iMessage to make plans and hang out. Some of them seem to use Snapchat or Instagram Chat, but without the expectation that everyone is going to be on it. Interestingly, people I know who are in their 30s are more likely to use FB Messenger, because they're more likely to have been on Facebook since it was introduced.īut people in their 20s seem to have eschewed Facebook. The only people who use WhatsApp are folks who have traveled internationally, have international friends, or international business contacts. I am in the US and very few older adults I know use over-the-top messaging apps, with perhaps the exception of Facebook Messenger. ex-US difference in how people use messaging. Those I know on iphone also rarely using iMessage.
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