I'm from Europe and live in Hong Kong, in both places, iMessage to us is like Edge for Windows users: a gimmick we see auto-installed but we dont use. So many people don't have an iPhone, and we change phone number every few months anyway. The US experience might be diff, and Europe / Asia aren't a single country, so maybe it even varies within.
Definitely Europe is not as homogenous as that. I do also live in Europe, people do use iMessage (or just text messages in general) where I am (to a much smaller extent than the FB messenger for instance which is much bigger than WhatsApp here).
And any meaningful number of people changing their phone number every few months is certainly not my experience whatsoever. Pretty much everyone I know have had the same number of years or over a decade or even longer.
Yeah I used it because the original comment did: ofc Europe is not a real homogeneous place.
I'm from Normandy to be hyper precise, and there, we don't have much iPhones or use iMessage. I certainly never heard of isolation due to lack of iMessage: we use sms or whatsapp.
In Hong Kong, it's common, maybe only among immigrants like me, to change number often, it just is, everyone I know does it, we just migrate with whatsapp. We do it to reduce the spam explosion over time as we give our numbers to more and more people, or to switch to cheaper 5G plans over time or stuff like that. I certainly hate now keeping a phone number too long, it just feels unsafe.
