About a month ago my wife and her sisters ditched SMS and started using WhatsApp for all of their messaging. See 2 of them use iPhones and the other uses an Android phone. They had been using SMS for years to have a group chat, but there have been tons of issues with that. SMS is slow, relies on a cellular connection instead of Wifi, does not sync across multiple devices, and is a poor option for sending images/videos. To solve this problem, they decided to start using WhatsApp instead.

WahtsApp seemed to solve all of their problems. It was a web-based service that they could use from any device they wanted, it was more reliable than SMS, and it was faster in every single way. It seemed like a win.

But today my wife mentioned in passing that she was browsing eBay for cheap iPhones. Apparently after a month of WhatsApp, she and her iPhone-owning sister have decided that it would be better to buy their sister an iPhone and use iMessage than stick with WhatsApp. Wow!

As with all of these stories, it’s a sample size of one, and is not indicative of how everyone feels, but I was honestly taken aback by the desire they had to use iMessage as their messaging platform over anything else out there. For them at least, it shows the value of iMessage and the power of Apple’s services.