How did carriers fuck it up so badly that, a decade later, it's barely a blip on the messaging landscape? The were so desperate to stop OTT (over the top) services that they... locked everything down in the hope that customers wouldn't churn. It backfired spectacularly.
Yes, it was as ridiculous as it sounds. There used to be news articles about kids racking up hundreds of dollars on their phone bill.
Here's one from the same year the iphone was released:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/0...
It was definitely a factor in the EU, though: SMS still aren't free on many prepaid plans there. WhatsApp was the first popular application supporting unlimited messaging on mobile phones for many.
I remember a lot of conversations in high school going "My plans maxed out can you text $friend?" IIRC you had to specifically turn off receiving texts or they'd charge you for each one and we were broke HS kids.
edit: Oh that article posted above is 2007. I guess it lasted way longer than I thought.
> Besides ease of use, there's another side benefit to this seamless integration. If you send messages regularly to iOS 5 users, you may be able to switch to a cheaper texting plan from your carrier. Assuming you send messages exclusively to iOS 5 users, you may one day be able to ditch a texting plan altogether.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/06/more-upcoming-ios-5-...
But the question here is: Were there any (reasonably popular) plans that provided data for smartphones, but not unlimited texting? If not, that couldn't have been a factor in the adoption of iMessage in the US.
(IIRC, my plan with Cingular didn't have any texts built-in, so they were 10¢ a pop, in each direction. I could send many thousands within the data plan's couple of gigabytes.)
Are you sure? I remember iMessage falling back to SMS if for some reason it can’t get through on iMessage.
I can also remember killing my data plan browsing Instagram while skipping my French class ... So about 7 years ago?
As a kid I used to make a collect call to my mom and when they asked who was calling I’d say, “pick me up” and hang up. Free short messages even in the 90’s!
Hello, fellow graybeard!
This is something I pull out every once in a while to let kids these days know how rough we had it: we had to pay 10-25 cents per minute for any in-state phone calls that weren't "local", where "local" was an arbitrary boundary on the map not even related to area code.
If we had to call out of state, charges started at $1 per minute. Every year at Christmas, we'd have an event where the local family would gather to make phone calls to out-of-state family. Because the cost was so high, we had to strictly ration time. Each kid (I was a kid then) got 3 minutes talk time.
This was late '70s/early '80s, and the figures are not adjusted for inflation.
The reason why WhatsApp was huge internationally (like, 10^8 users huge) was because many teclos in developing countries included data usage in their plans but SMS was extra (and talking minutes were finite), so people used WhatsApp for all comms.
WhatsApp's had a free tier, but their basic plan was (IIRC) $1/month, and they many (tens/hundreds) of millions of users that paid it.
Facebook bought WhatsApp for $20B:
* https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-whatsapp-idUSKCN...
> Evidently, Zuckerberg lied to the European and American trade commissions. It was in fact possible to interface Facebook and WhatsApp platforms to mine data. Facebook has been doing it since day one of its acquisition. As always, Zuckerberg admitted to the misdeed, apologized and paid the fine. He got away scot-free.
> Months later, co-founder Jan Koum discovered that Facebook’s management weakened WhatsApp encryption system to make it easier for them to mine data. Koum resigned too.
> Fast forward to today and Zuckerberg continues to mine our data through Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram (which he acquired in 2012). Facebook has become a surveillance behemoth – arguably the biggest surveillance organization in the world.
* https://www.philstar.com/opinion/2023/04/05/2256935/real-rea...
US users quickly had access to unlimited SMS and calling on most phone plans, which is why Whatsapp never took root.
In the EU for instance, the reverse was true. Particularly, unlimited data was cheap and affordable, where as SMS was quite costly (even more than in the US in some cases) so data heavy apps were easier to adopt. Hence, WhatsApp, Telegram etc. gaining so much popularity. iMessage was introduced much later to the rich messaging market than these apps in those countries (because mobile messaging apps were cheap to adopt in markets where mobile data is cheap).
There is much more competition in those countries with cheap mobile data in the rich messaging services space. In the US, unlimited data has had a more sordid history, and SMS / MMS had a much bigger adoption rate early on
iMessage was free once you had a smartphone plan.
And no, smartphone plans didn’t automatically come with unlimited SMS. I had to “upgrade” for that.
Unless you went over your data limit.
Start sending any kind of media and all bets are off.
iMessage "won" because it was the default for iPhone users in the US. Similarly, Whatsapp is the default nowhere and I don't know anyone who uses it, but that might be a generational thing. Whatsapp has always struck me as common in Europe, but rare in the US. We just use text and FB Messenger.
However, international SMS/MMS was extremely expensive, and that was the main impetus for WhatsApp. It required no password or making accounts or remembering all of that, hence all non tech savvy people could easily use it. And it worked flawlessly, with zero exorbitant international charges, because you knew everything was going via data.
The cable television industry did the exact same thing. If they’d been willing to go OTT a decade ago and not force agreements based on geolocation, a lot of the streaming services that exist wouldn’t even need to exist today.
Kinda but not really. The cable providers were and continue to be hamstrung by the networks who force the cable providers to buy channel packages. Cable never had the leverage to, say, tell Disney that they only want to offer ESPN but not the 10 other Disney branded networks being offered. It was often all or nothing.
But if you want to see someone that appeals to the whole populace, then you will have to compete with the whole populace.
TicketMaster is a textbook example of a consumer-harming monopoly, and yet they have gone unprosecuted for decades. No excuse.
Pathetic.
Ticketmaster isn't the true price-gouger. It's actually the artist + promotor + venue that collectively set the high prices. Ticketmaster is just the administrative computer system to implement the high prices that the artist/promoter/venue want to charge.
For example, top artists can negotiate to get 105% of ticket's face value from the concert promoter. Indeed, people have speculated that Taylor Swift had so much leverage in negotiating the terms of the Eras tour that she got 110% of the ticket's face price.[1]
If Taylor gets 110% of the ticket money, how does that leave anything left for the promoter and the venue?!? With those artists' financial demands, you now have a math problem: where to get the extra +5% or +10% and also pay the promoter+venue without taking a loss? By charging extra fees.
It's a very clever bit of financial sleight-of-hand. The artist/promoter/venue can all charge more money but hide the blame by embedding it in Ticketmaster's "convenience fees", "service fees", "order processing fees", etc, etc. In this way, Ticketmaster is perceived as the parasite.
Your question where Ticketmaster is already assumed to be the "bad guy" means Ticketmaster's deliberate manipulation of public perception is working exactly as designed.
Yes, but when other promoters (not Live Nation) book artists at non-LN venues and use Tickemaster as the ticketing agent, all the extra convenience fees are still there.
E.g. Taylor Swift's promoter for Eras Tour was AEG, not Live Nation. And in Dallas, she performed at AT&T Stadium which is a venue owned by City of Arlington, not Live Nation. Ticketmaster was only the agent selling tickets for that Dallas show and it still had all the extra TM service fees padding out the price. In that case, Taylor Swift + AEG + AT&T Stadium got their slices of the pie by using Ticketmaster fees as the "bad guy".
Live Nation acquiring Ticketmaster in 2010 doesn't fundamentally change what Ticketmaster is designed to do: take the public relations blame for artists, etc charging the higher prices.
The networks ruined their own businesses too — even if some were smarter than others (HBO being the smartest and also why it was the most valuable asset of the AT&T acquisition and the Discovery acquisition) — but I chose to focus on the cable companies b/c they are dumb pipes the same way wireless carriers are and they refused to disrupt themselves.
And the networks were already offering online access to their content via TV Everywhere. They didn’t want to do the geolocation thing, that was all requirements of the cable companies (the issues with the network broadcasters like ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox are much more complex).
In fact, you could (and I would) argue that it was the cable companies insistence on maintaining their defacto monopolies on who could get what service where (because there was never consumer choice in who your cable provider is, unless you count satellite, which I do not) that pushed the networks hands into creating their own competing OTT services based on the content they owned. Because as people cut the cord, the networks weren’t going to watch their businesses completely go up in flames. Now, should they have done that sooner and more aggressively (HBO did it best and earliest with HBO Now as a companion to HBO Go — a move that earned them the ire of the cable industry, the same industry who often refused to let HBO Go subscribers who paid the cable companies directly for HBO, do things like access the service on an Xbox b.c they didn’t like the idea of people not paying a $5 a month fee for an extra box), yes. 1000%
But let’s not pretend like the cable companies were without leverage. If they’d acted decisively and disrupted themselves early enough, they were the ones with the direct relationship with the customer, not the networks. They were the ones who could have created their own bundles of OTT content. But no, they refused until it was too late and got to see the whole industry bleed itself and for live content to essentially die.
People didn’t quit cable because of price. They did it because of price to perceived value. As has been shown with the current state of streaming services, it isn’t actually cheaper to cut the cord. But what you do get is a lot more flexibility.
Imagine if Comcast had offered its own YouTube TV style service in 2012 (something Intel tried to do in late 2013 before it was summarily canceled — I almost took a job on that team and dodged a bullet), rather than hoping against hope that cord cutting wouldn’t take off? You’d probably have a bunch of Comcast subscribers to this day who were satisfied that they could watch all their TV live and on demand whenever they wanted.
No idea what kind of poor purchasing decisions would lead to that. You can't get any form of cable package for less than $150 a month last time I checked. I don't pay anywhere near that for Internet + a couple of streaming services.
Oh, and the $30 a year or whatever for a VPN.
So each major device-vendor developed his client-app, and ended up with interoperability issues not only with the RCS-servers used by a given carrier, but also with devices of OTHER vendors. And that doesn't even begin to cover the issues on inter-carrier messaging...
The situation was only resolved after Google acquired Jibe Mobile (the biggest player in developing RCS server/client applications for carriers) and basically created a single RCS-client/server implementation using their Android Messages app and a Google-owned server.
But when you were working on RCS back in 2012, you may remember that at that time, RCS didn't even support store&forward (!!).
So if the receiving device was not available when a message was delivered (because it had no network or client wasn't running on a device, which happened alot especially on iOS because the client was in a constant fight with the OS), the message wasn't queued anywhere.
Apart from the obvious issue of missing messages, it caused the even worse UX-impact that the entire conversation looked different on sender/receiver.
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Ah yes, and: RCS was originally designed with per-message billing in mind (of course). At the time it was launched it was finally clear to the carriers that those times are over, but the whole architecture had quite a chunk of billing architecture in it as well...
Thank you for highlighting this. This important piece of information often gets lost in the "green bubble" discussion.
Google has significant incentives for pushing RCS for more than one reason.
Google doesn't own the RCS-specification, the spec is still defined and maintained by GSMA, with Google just having one of the seats at the table (along with carriers and device manufacturers).
Apple is also a member of GSMA, them adopting RCS means that they just take another seat at the table of the RCS working group.
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> Google has significant incentives for pushing RCS for more than one reason.
I don't know if you mean to imply some hidden Agenda. The incentive is to standardize "rich communication" across mobile platforms. "Green bubble" is one manifestation of the bigger issue that 27 years after the creation of SMS there is still no other universal method for me to send a text to your phone number today.
The main reason for that is, that several players still hope to own this communication channel to the user with their proprietary app, become the "Western WeChat" and sell access to the users.
RCS could be an universal non-proprietary method, open to be adopted by Apple, Facebook, WhatsApp and whoever wants to build a Message ecosystem. It has the potential to end this hassle and allow me to send a text to your number and reach you regardless of your OS and application of preference.
Okay. The main incentive is to create a competitive method for messaging which allows rich communication with everyone, regardless of platform or ecosystem just via their phone number.
Name five more.
There is little new information to gain for them, no matter how Android users communicate with Apple users right now.
There is however a lot to gain for them if a unified rich communication standard is established in the market, because apart from finally being able to replace SMS, it would drive platform-agnostic innovation in this area.
Google and Apple agreeing on a standard could disrupt the ecosystems of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Vibr, Zoom, MS Teams etc.
The client and the OS don't really give them any metadata or message content. Operating the server infrastructure would.
SMS doesn't touch their servers (except possibly for people that use Google's Messages app and/or backup service); RCS does.
> There is however a lot to gain for them if a unified rich communication standard is established in the market, because apart from finally being able to replace SMS, it would drive platform-agnostic innovation in this area.
Absolutely, but that open standard will hopefully not be RCS. It's way too coupled to the 3GPP/ITU model of doing things.
I trust the organizations in charge of the web and Internet (who brought us email and XMPP/Jabber!) a bit more than those who still somewhat yearn for the days in which OTT players did not exist and telecommunication was charged by the mile and minute or message.
The client includes a spam protection service which allows them to send message data to a server for scanning. Every other messaging app uses the Notification service to send the message and its relevant metadata to the OS. So as far as conspiracy goes, Google has all the means to get the data already today.
RCS is (was) the prime example of Apple's anticompetitive behavior, after the App Store exclusivity, preventing side loading, and disallowing alternative browsers.
It's now some badge of shame Apple users discriminate against the blue vs green windows if a friend or relative doesn't have an i-thing, and Apple loves it all the way to the bank.
This, but with Apple. Whether or not Google whined about it, iMessage was never going to last. It was never a matter of if iMessage would be forced to reconcile itself with the interoperable protocol it replaced, but when.
So... Apple should have been ready. They should have been drafting absurd standards centered around their own servers, and taunting Google into adopting it. They could have even charged a license fee for the software. But instead they played high and mighty, and now they have to contend with the law. Frankly, I'm glad Google summoned Shai Hulud.
It's hard to imaging you sincerely think this would have been better. It seems like you want them to engage in dishonesty.
> But instead they played high and mighty, and now they have to contend with the law.
iMessage isn't going anywhere. They're just going to add RCS support in the same way that SMS is supported, because now there is momementum for carrier support. This is really a storm in a teacup.
Isn't the situation in the EU that they're looking to force Apple to allow others to use the iMessage protocol? So why would Apple work on getting Google to support iMessage, when Google is putting in work to get access to it?
If they'd simply added a "WhatsApp/iMessage mode" to Google Chat in 2015 (i.e. allow Google account based users to seamlessly communicate with phone number based users), I think we might be seeing a very different messaging landscape today.
They'd have been sued by WhapsApp and Apple if they did that since they're proprietary protocols.
iOS /iPadOS (and by extension, iPhone and iPad) however, has slim-to-major majorities in most lucrative markets[0] and even in markets where iOS is not a majority, its well known in the mobile industry that iOS / iPadOS customers are far more lucrative
[0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ios-vs-android-market-share-1...
Japan: 65.88%
Denmark: 64.04%
Norway: 61.94%
Canada: 57.84%
Australia: 57.47%
United States: 56.74%
Switzerland: 55.92%
Sweden: 55.33%
United Kingdom: 51.63%
Taiwan: 51.32%
from: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/iphone-ma...
Also surprising as I always thought Android was more popular because there is more variety and cheaper options.
It's still a race war, apple (rich folk) vs. everyone else. Some middle ground probably, but not much - apple folks are obviously the richer targets.
I know who to target with spyware and otherwise get rich quick schemes, ransomware, kidnapping, almost any other major crimes. The best demographic with 1200 to spend on a phone.
It's not a "race war" if you need to clarify that apple <=> "rich folk". I might give you "class war", except there is no "war" part and no need to include it.
Not really. It's dominant in some regions but definitely not a huge chunk of Asia.
SMS revenues to hit $67B - 2007
https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/metric-sms-revenues-...
They used to love using SMS to take as much money as possible from their customers. Imagine texting "Hey" to a friend and getting charged $0.20 for it.