question is why the US held on to SMS for so long? Had we followed along with the rest of the world, there would have been no need for platform specific messaging like iMessage. Larger sized images and videos were available on Whatsapp pretty early as well. Whatsapp had features like voice calls over data, video calling, and read receipts long before Apple implemented them. The group message options, being able to leave a group, and muting temporarily are also pretty slick. Best of all, Whatsapp is platform neutral and the desktop app works well.

Fortunately, I was living outside the US when Whatsapp was released so I adopted it early on. Not sure why the US didn't get the memo.