> There is a subset of the family that uses facetime, they don't talk to the rest of us as often anymore.
To me, this is one of the greatest shortcomings of video chat. We went from a universal phone system to a mostly universal SMS system (most private networks still supported SMS) to a segregated video chat system, and it hurts relationships if you're not careful.
That is one of my main frustrations with Apple: In order to compel more people to use their platform, they made a proprietary communication service, and preloaded it on all of their devices. Now I have to deal with this arbitrary segregation, just because some corporation decided it would help their bottom line.
This is exactly the kind of practice rms warned us about decades ago, and there is nothing any individual can do about it.
The problem is that it isn't preinstalled, while iMessage and Facetime are.
Apple tries very hard to convince its users that its practices are not the problem, but those who choose not to use Apple products. Anything that doesn't come preinstalled is seen as an unnecessary inconvenience by most iPhone users.
No, they just prefer what iOS provides, or they don't know many people who use WhatsApp. For all it's popularity elsewhere, here in the States, WhatsApp is not used very much.
I've never downloaded WhatsApp, mainly because I don't know anyone who's on it. That's a bigger barrier than anything being preinstalled.
We had video chat before the iPhone. It's part of the UMTS standard and was one of the major selling points when the carriers rolled it out in the early 2000's. I don't know much about its technical merits, it would surprise me if it was any good using today's standards, but it was cross platform and could have been built upon if the two new mobile OS makers had been interested. But since the iPhone didn't even have UMTS when it was launched it's no surprise Apple didn't include support for it.
To me, this is one of the greatest shortcomings of video chat. We went from a universal phone system to a mostly universal SMS system (most private networks still supported SMS) to a segregated video chat system, and it hurts relationships if you're not careful.