Do you even need to ask your recipient what carrier they're using or do you just punch in their number and text away? Does it work regardless of what brand of mobile phone they have? Does it work even if their phone is temporarily disconnected from the network?
WeChat has all of those features, but I don't think anyone would regard it as other than proprietary...
It's actually really sad to see these events... one of my favorite things in the late 90's and early 00's was actually the voice chat rooms in Yahoo messenger, but the bots ruined that platform... it was proprietary, but it was fun.
These days, it's pretty much SMS only for me... I don't need an app that only works on my phone, not my desktop, and actively spies on me, and sucks my battery life. I do have skype which I use sometimes, mostly for those that I talk to overseas on rare occassion.
I had high hopes that XMPP or a decent replacement would evolve that actually worked well... same goes for Diaspora and a bunch of other things though. In the end people like their walled gardens. :-(
Matrix (http://matrix.org/) is getting there. It does work well, though it's still in early (and active) development.
You and me both. I don't have space on my phone for every individual messaging app that my various friends use.
"Have you got whatsapp?" No "Do you use Kik?" No etc.
Except for when it does not. More often than not carriers don't return the correct status codes, marking messages as delivered when in fact the recipient does not even have SMS enabled in their contract. This gets even worse with international messages that can be routed through multiple carriers' networks until they reach (or don't) their final destination.