I found it surprising at the time that instant messaging apps that originated on PCs (ICQ, AIM, Skype, etc...) did not get widely adopted for this role despite most of the well-known ones releasing iOS and Android versions at the time.
It was dead simple to use. You had a phone, installed Whatsapp, it sent you a verification text that it automatically read and verified to ensure you owned that phone number, and that was your “account”.
No user names to remember, no passwords, a completely computer illiterate person could use it, especially if their first device ever was a smartphone.
And it worked amazingly well. And there was no spam. I specifically remember sharing contacts being a pain in the ass until WhatsApp came along.
I kinda wish that had paned out.
It'd still be hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly revenue. Plus businesses.
Microsoft really missed an opportunity, I remember using a third party app for Messenger and the mobile experience wasn't great. Skype was too focused on voice and video calls, not seen as an instant messaging app, even though it could very well have been.
The biggest fumble really comes from Google though. I was using Google Talk as my main messaging app on PC, and Android had pretty much everything ready before iOS, including video chat over 3G.
However Google went through a pointless revamp with Hangouts and never managed a convincing SMS integration.
Enter Whatsapp, which has been pretty consistent through the years, and of course guess which one people use.
[1]: Of course, it's crazy from a product management perspective - but from a "launch a new product to get the next promotion" perspective...
Where Google went wrong was bowing to pressure from carriers to stop doing that. Carriers had been much more powerful in the past, and I think Google failed to recognize just how fast their influence was waning.
Google killed the integration in 2017 when they started betting on RCS and Google Messages more seriously.
So it was trying to juggle carrier + OEMs + Android and keep everyone happy.
Anything that upset one party wasn't going to happen. Only in more recent, Samsung/Pixel-centric times has Google had iPhone-like negotiating weight (and will).
Not just paid, they gouge their enterprise customers for it. Signal did a cost breakdown[0] and of their $13.7 million infra costs, a whopping $6 million is "registration fees".
I don't have an authoritative citation, but complaints from carriers is often reported as the reason Google backed away from the default SMS client decision. Here's one example, but I've seen it from other publications: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/rip-google-hangouts-...
I had a Nexus 4 and then 5 in 2013 and even though I was a big Hangouts user, I quickly disabled the SMS integration as it served no purpose in my case.
It would be extremely weird for carriers to pressure Google on such a niche feature among Android users when Apple actually pulled it off successfully for the other half of their subscribers.
> Google caved and introduced the standalone Google Messages in the next Android release.
This was more likely motivated by Jibe's acquisition and Google pushing a big revamp of RCS (Universal Profile) at the GSMA.
Ars also forgets to mention Allo. Google's strategy was a complete mess on its own, no need to blame carriers.
I can't help but think carriers were the reason Samsung didn't make Hangouts the default SMS client, which contributed to Hangouts not gaining momentum fast enough, which led to Google acquiring Jibe and launching other chat products.
> and once shared-data plans reach critical mass, Verizon and other companies will have an active incentive to encourage the use of messaging services like Skype. More Web-sent data requires a beefier data allotment, after all.
Wasn't that already the case?! I didn't really follow plans available in the US around 2012-2013, but in East Asia and Europe, making subscribers pay more for bigger and faster data packages on LTE is exactly what every carrier was doing.
Regarding Samsung phones, of course Samsung had a good relationship with carriers and would typically be more willing to bend to their will, for instance by delaying and doing staged rollouts of firmware upgrades. However this isn't the main reason here. Samsung was absolutely dominating the Android market, being pretty much the only player making comfortable profit margins on the hardware. On the other hand, Samsung's leadership understood that there was nothing easier than moving from an Android phone to another, and that eventually a big part of the cake would be eaten by Chinese OEMs. Samsung worked hard on building its own brand of phones with One UI and its predecessors. The leadership absolutely hated the fact Google forced so many apps being preinstalled on certified Android phones. Hence people complaining about the number of duplicate apps seen as bloatware, sometimes rightfully so.
I don't think Samsung was afraid carriers would take offense at something as ubiquitous as OTT messaging. Case in point, I had coworkers working on ChatON, our own version of iMessage/FaceTime. This was a flop obviously, which is a bit sad since I believe Samsung had a real chance to acquire KakaoTalk around that time.
iMessage was exactly that sort of threat, and articles from the time mention carriers disliking it. Not selling iPhones would have hurt a carrier more than it would have hurt Apple, so their negotiating position was weak.
Google didn't have as tight control over Android as it does now, so carriers could pressure OEMs to not include Hangouts, or at least not make it the default SMS client.
But even on (near) stock Android, you could easily install the AOSP client, or some third party (Textra was popular somehow).
I'm surprised Sony wouldn't bundle a proper SMS client by default. I thought only Nexus phones and Motorolas would default to Hangouts for a relatively short period, until Google started pushing Messages instead.
I remember using Hangouts (and Google Talk before it) with almost everybody in my social circle. It had XMPP interoperability for a while (which let me use it at a computer, even with my phone battery dead, at a time when WhatsApp was available on the phone only) and it otherwise just worked.
I never understood why Google went out of their way as much as they did to kill a perfectly fine product in favor of various alternatives that just looked like yet another WhatsApp clone, including all the deficiencies of that (i.e. being single-device only, not using the existing Google account social network etc.)