I think this is mostly an issue in the US. The rest of the world uses a variety of messaging apps instead of text messaging. Here in South Africa WhatsApp and Telegram are prevalent.

Genuine question here: why? Text messaging that comes with the phone is easier to use than installing 20 different apps to talk to 20 different people. Is this a younger generation thing? “I just like it better” was the only response my daughter gave for this. That’s nice and all if it’s one person but if everyone does is, that’s a lot of work. I don’t even talk to that many people yet I have to use a different app to talk to every person I know.

SMS used to be really expensive and limited feature wise. Sending messages over IP ment that you did not have to care about how many messages you sent and you could send media with non potato resolution. Media over the phone network (MMS) was basically limited to small images.

Since the messing apps were developed by third parties (and not your phone company) there were a market for several of them. The phone companies tried to counter with RCS, but being phone companies and not internet savvy pioneers, it was a slow process to get s wide adoption.