[dheera]

> total lock-in

You have these problems with carriers as well. They're technically interoperable but they hit you with prohibitively expensive rates if you try to do anything international. Carriers are also effectively government-controlled monopolies or biopolies in a lot of places so users end up locked-in anyway.

> lack of interoperability

Again, you have these problems. Yes, phones are interoperable with phones, but they're not interoperable with anything else. IP-based messaging apps have the potential for phones to interoperate with computers, tablets, VR googles, smartwatches, and whatever else you want (although not all do at the moment -- Wechat and Whatsapp suck in particular -- but at least they have the potential, and some actually do interoperate with non-phone devices -- such as Facebook and Hangouts).

Phones may not necessarily be the center of everything 10 years down the road. I'd rather the freedom to innovate be with the software companies, not the operators of one particular infrastructure.

[unsignedint]

> You have these problems with carriers as well. They're technically interoperable but they hit you with prohibitively expensive rates if you try to do anything international.

And very poor transparency on those short codes... I once got some extra charges, because of a shortcode (it was actually Yahoo!) I happened use was international. (No way to tell that by the number alone.) It was surprising to hear from the carrier I didn't have any way to block international text, too.