Not bizarre at all. Many EU countries mobile users have "prepaid" SIMs. Whatsapp came at the perfect moment - mobile operators were starting to offer decently priced data plans but were also still very stingy with SMS (which was a bit of a cash cow for them, infra costs were very low) and essentially never added at the time advanced features (like MMS) to any prepaid plan ever. Many of these operators never really recovered from becoming dumb pipes.

Now the network effects have set in and it's hard to remove "naturally" WhatsApp, combined with the rise of VoIP spam callers which operators are too happy to tolerate (like they tolerated things like premium ringtones and numbers until they were forced not to)

WhatsApp became popular long before Meta bought it in 2014. Signal and Telegram both came late to the scene, both around the time of the WhatsApp acquisition. Whatsapp was simply in the right place at the right time with little competition, and a combination of network effects and Meta mostly leaving it alone make it hard to get enough traction for anything else

The US has more of an Apple-monoculture and apparently moved to unlimited SMS plans much earlier than Europe, so iMessage was able to fill the same niche

Whatsapp was just too convenient at a time no good alternatives existed, and when Smartphones were not ubiquitous.

It was free while SMS was not, and it ran on basically every cellphone that existed, no matter how shitty it was.

Network effects mean that replacing it is extremely hard. I tried getting people I know into Signal, Telegram, anything else. All those attempts were short lived.

I can't see it changing without some actual external intervention (e.g.: Meta being barred from operating it in Europe, etc).

The example was just mentioned as an extreme thing that would move this particular needle, not as something I think can oe will realistically happen.

My pet theory is that it's just because don't have a critical mass of iOS users to make iMessage viable and still wanted features at least half a decade before RCS got to a usable state.

Not that bizarre when you are paying something like 5-10 cents per SMS (~2010), you will quickly find alternative solutions. WhatsApp was just there, communication for free. Then you Viber, Telegram and others.

I had an iPhone and I was considering iMessage to be just fancy name for SMS, so I have avoided using it. Only years later I have found out that it was actually communication platform similar to WhatsApp, which can fallback on SMS.

That might be more likely now given recent events