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...
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.
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...
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.
US users quickly had access to unlimited SMS and calling on most phone plans, which is why Whatsapp never took root.
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.