

It was honestly surprising to learn that SMS/RCS/iMessage is the most common way to send messages in the US, as it hasn’t been that way in the UK for over a decade now.
For better or worse, folks in the UK & EU all switched to apps like WhatsApp, Messenger, Viber, etc. due to better features and free international calls.
It seems like RCS is finally mature enough to compete, but good luck getting folks to move back.
WhatsApp wasn’t a Meta product when it originally took off; Meta didn’t even exist at the time. WhatsApp was bought by Facebook in 2014, and already had hundreds of millions of users at the time.