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> Are you saying everyone in your social circle willingly vendor-locks themselves by using an app that is available only on a specific device? The problem is this isn't how a non-technical audience views the problem. To them, they get a fully featured chat (rich media, reactions, hi def photos, etc) with most of their social circle. They don't have to install anything, they don't have to sign up for anything, they don't even have to remember different credentials, it just works. Best of all, it just works across their ipads and macs, too. Sure, it doesn't work for a portion of their friends, but from their perspective, their friends are the weird ones: why wouldn't you switch to a phone that has a "better" experience like this? > By no means there is a shortage of messaging apps and protocols This is a bug, not a feature, in a world where there's no common clients that work across all those ecosystems. You go back to 2008ish and you have half a dozen clients that speak Jabber or XMPP. You can sign into GTalk or Facebook Messenger or (gods forbid) Yahoo Messenger all from the same application, and it all mostly works. Now you have a zillion apps and a zillion logins and some of them have nice features and some don't, but without interop, there's an upper limit to the number of chat apps people are willing to maintain to just talk to other people. Especially when, for Apple users, the best one is already on their device. |