this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
75 points (85.7% liked)
Android
713 readers
5 users here now
Android news for android developers. Everything that happens in android world.
For Android development specific topics please see /c/android_dev
The Android robot is reproduced or modified from work created and shared by Google and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Whatsapp is preinstalled on every phone you buy here (including iPhones, AFAIK, but maybe that's a sync thing? I don't know, I haven't seen an iPhone in ages). So it's pretty comparable these days.
For what it's worth, the timeline shift isn't just due to the SMS pricing changes. I think the general introduction of mobile telephony was also pretty staggered. I remember US-based media depicting the idea of a teen having long SMS conversations before I or anybody I knew had a feature phone. MSN dominance wasn't caused by expensive text messaging, it predates text messaging altogether, at least for mainstream users.
SMS is definitely a solid fallback for emergency services, though. It definitely retains use, even if it's mostly notifications from governments and companies.
I meant MSN still being dominant even after cellphones offered the capacity to chat via text. WhatsApp was introduced in 2009, the first iPhone was introduced to the market two years prior, that's a whole lot of time where text communication on cellphones was done via SMS.
Sure, and mainstream texting predates the iPhone by several years. And the iPhone wasn't an instant hit over here, either. Too expensive, both the hardware and the data plans. Hell, I already had a full time job by then and even being a techhead I waited several generations and only got an iPod Touch because getting the GSM version seemed like a waste of a LOT of money just to get access to the App Store.
But still, MSN's dominance predates texting and it just kept that role while texting was a separate way to catch up with people on the go. And yeah, it was expensive, or at least paid piecemeal, so people went as far as using their phones as beepers, giving each other little deliberately missed calls to point them towards other messaging apps or social media. Because social media also happened, and it also predates smartphones, and it kinda took over for MSN Messenger. By the time Android phones got big over here, let alone data plans or SMS became the norm, those became the default.
So yeah, the economics of it all drove the adoption, along with companies being more regional (no ICQ or AOL over here, either), but it's more of a series of mismatches in the timeline, rather than a direct line from SMS pricing to Whatsapp. There are multiple different tangents along the way, and they're different in different places.