[DaiPlusPlus]

> advent of 3G internet with minimum viable bandwidth to be able to operate things like maps and GPS and payment processing in real time

I just realized that GPS was probably the reason: I remember my first time using Uber and it was the fact you could see the location of the car and yourself on the map in real-time, and so you could easily get to the car without the usual hassle of trying to locate and identify each other. That's just not possible with SMS (even if a phone did support GPS, I've never seen anything like "send coordinates by SMS" on a feature-phone, and even if the server could render a map it wouldn't be downloaded in real-time to be useful.

...though if it was a Java mobile app for each platform, that might have worked (even over GPRS), but considering how expensive mobile-data was at the time, hmm, yeah.