I don't even know what the dominant messenger is here in Australia I just tell everyone that if they wanna message me they better be using signal or get ignored. Some get it most don't. Those that get signal get invites to parties hangouts and responses. Those that don't get their messages looked at once every 6months when I remember that those apps exist and I could be bothered to swap accounts on my phone.

...requires hardware virtualization apparently.

Wish I could say! But many influential people in tech/media/politics are iMessage diehards, and she was no exception

Twitter never took off in my area for some reason but lot of people I knew used Facebook messenger about 10 years ago which was a pain. I'm pretty sure the popularity of Whatsapp is thanks to Vodafone. They had contracts years ago that allowed unlimited use of Whatsapp without affecting your data usage. This lead a lot of people to believe that happens on all contracts. I still can't convince my Grandma that calling through Whatsapp uses both of our data.

Come on down to your local counterculture bookstore and boy do we have some sewn patches to sell you!