Cellphone network fees have historically been ridiculously expensive, when I was young a single SMS message cost about 80c, whilst for 10x that fee I could get enough data to send hundreds of WhatsApp or similar data-based messages.

In time providers tried to draw more subscribers to their networks by making the data used by messaging apps like WhatsApp free, so even if you had no prepaid airtime (in Africa most people use prepaid airtime) you could still send messages with these apps even though you couldn’t SMS.

These days messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram (the latter especially) are just simply more feature-rich than SMS, and you’re not locked into a specific hardware platform such as iPhone & Mac with iMessage.

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.