> When iMessage launched as part of iOS 5, free unlimited SMS was still not a normal thing.
It wasn’t universal on all wireless plans, for sure, but by 2011, in the U.S., it was definitely more common that at least for smartphone plans, which were starting to shift into charging for amounts of data usage rather than blanket “unlimited” buckets and were also starting to charge extra fees for tethering (this is also the time that LTE became real and usable in the U.S.), you’d get unlimited or seemingly nearly unlimited messaging plans as part of the fee.
Carriers had been offering large or unlimited text plans for years at this point — my SideKick in high school had unlimited texting as part of the $20 a month fee that T-Mobile charged on top of the minutes plan to operate the software. BlackBerry took advantage of this too with its BIS plans on carriers and the “free texting” lure of BlackBerry via BBM and SMS was a big selling point of those devices for sure.
But the key here is “for smartphone plans.” You still had a lot of non-smartphone users in 2011 and so part of the pitch to get them to spend $500 on a phone that would require a $50 a month plan was unlimited texts. iMessage was a nice carrot here
What I think iMessage did was not only spur carriers to cut the SMS fees even further (again, for smartphone plans), but it was a great additional reason to get people to adopt smartphones. Because the sort of unspoken rule was that if you had a smartphone in the U.S., you had unlimited texting. Most people in the U.S. don’t text people outside the U.S. so unless you have family or friends in other countries or you do a lot of international business, I think SMS was just sort of an accepted default for a lot of people.
So the timing for iMessage in the U.S. was perfect because it used the same default app everyone used, could work on your Mac or iPad or iPod touch too AND it worked internationally with other iPhones. Plus blue bubbles and the many significant technical and security improvements over the old way. But mostly blue bubbles.
But as the other poster said, the lure of BBM and later WhatsApp in the rest of the world was largely that you could use it internationally for free. And the iPhone didn’t get its strong international adoption until after things like WhatsApp had already landed.
The iPhone’s initial carrier restrictions didn’t start to lift until 2011-ish and 2012 so you had Android growing extremely quickly in Europe and Latin America and Asia, where a thing like WhatsApp (which debuted first on iPhone in 2009, it then came to BlackBerry and then in 2010 Android and Symbian) could grow like a weed and have hundreds of millions of users before most people in the U.S. had even heard of it. (I was on CNN and Fox Business in 2014 explaining what WhatsApp was and why Facebook had just spent $20b on it).
So I think timing on iMessage was perfect for U.S. domination (where iPhone marketshare is over 50% but depending on your demographic/age, is probably even higher) but it might have just missed being the defacto tool in the rest of the world.
No one cared about blue bubbles when iMessage launched, because it hadn't yet become symbolic of "in the ecosystem, can be in group chats without breaking certain features." (In fact, I'm not even sure how many of the user-facing group chat features that break with SMS were even present in 2011...)
The idea that "blue bubbles" were somehow a major driver of iMessage adoption when it first debuted is rank historical revisionism to fit a narrative that isn't even all that universal today.
It wasn’t universal on all wireless plans, for sure, but by 2011, in the U.S., it was definitely more common that at least for smartphone plans, which were starting to shift into charging for amounts of data usage rather than blanket “unlimited” buckets and were also starting to charge extra fees for tethering (this is also the time that LTE became real and usable in the U.S.), you’d get unlimited or seemingly nearly unlimited messaging plans as part of the fee.
Carriers had been offering large or unlimited text plans for years at this point — my SideKick in high school had unlimited texting as part of the $20 a month fee that T-Mobile charged on top of the minutes plan to operate the software. BlackBerry took advantage of this too with its BIS plans on carriers and the “free texting” lure of BlackBerry via BBM and SMS was a big selling point of those devices for sure.
But the key here is “for smartphone plans.” You still had a lot of non-smartphone users in 2011 and so part of the pitch to get them to spend $500 on a phone that would require a $50 a month plan was unlimited texts. iMessage was a nice carrot here
What I think iMessage did was not only spur carriers to cut the SMS fees even further (again, for smartphone plans), but it was a great additional reason to get people to adopt smartphones. Because the sort of unspoken rule was that if you had a smartphone in the U.S., you had unlimited texting. Most people in the U.S. don’t text people outside the U.S. so unless you have family or friends in other countries or you do a lot of international business, I think SMS was just sort of an accepted default for a lot of people.
So the timing for iMessage in the U.S. was perfect because it used the same default app everyone used, could work on your Mac or iPad or iPod touch too AND it worked internationally with other iPhones. Plus blue bubbles and the many significant technical and security improvements over the old way. But mostly blue bubbles.
But as the other poster said, the lure of BBM and later WhatsApp in the rest of the world was largely that you could use it internationally for free. And the iPhone didn’t get its strong international adoption until after things like WhatsApp had already landed.
The iPhone’s initial carrier restrictions didn’t start to lift until 2011-ish and 2012 so you had Android growing extremely quickly in Europe and Latin America and Asia, where a thing like WhatsApp (which debuted first on iPhone in 2009, it then came to BlackBerry and then in 2010 Android and Symbian) could grow like a weed and have hundreds of millions of users before most people in the U.S. had even heard of it. (I was on CNN and Fox Business in 2014 explaining what WhatsApp was and why Facebook had just spent $20b on it).
So I think timing on iMessage was perfect for U.S. domination (where iPhone marketshare is over 50% but depending on your demographic/age, is probably even higher) but it might have just missed being the defacto tool in the rest of the world.