I think it did effect things. SMS is weirdly popular in the US (i think it’s might be cause they didn’t use it much in the 90s?) but people I know in France and UK still use texts for some things, even if messaging apps are where most of communication happens (French people even use mms which is insane).
I know that I managed to convince a number of tech-shy people (including parents) to get Signal by telling them replaced their sms app, so it wasn’t a whole extra app / network they needed to use. It was great for me because I could ditch WhatsApp completely. But when signal stopped supporting sms they went back to just whatsapping and texting, so I cracked and reinstalled WhatsApp to keep in touch with them.
Signal shot it’s self in the foot removing sms capabilities. Tragic.
This is US defaultism. People doesn’t care about sms capabilities outside the US. The US isn’t a huge market for Signal.
I think it did effect things. SMS is weirdly popular in the US (i think it’s might be cause they didn’t use it much in the 90s?) but people I know in France and UK still use texts for some things, even if messaging apps are where most of communication happens (French people even use mms which is insane).
I know that I managed to convince a number of tech-shy people (including parents) to get Signal by telling them replaced their sms app, so it wasn’t a whole extra app / network they needed to use. It was great for me because I could ditch WhatsApp completely. But when signal stopped supporting sms they went back to just whatsapping and texting, so I cracked and reinstalled WhatsApp to keep in touch with them.
Liberia
No one I know use SMS for chat. The last SMS I had sent was 3 years ago.