Text messaging, in the pre-iPhone era, is what killed IM... and then it “came back” so to speak as a contentious feature of mobile phones (iMessage, Hangouts).
Text messaging won because everyone had a phone number and smart-phones/data services were seen by the masses as unnecessary or a luxury. When most people send a “text” they’re sending an IM be it over WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, Hangouts (or whatever google’s is these days), Slack, etc so it really does suck we’ve gone full circle ended up where we started.
From the sounds of it, looks like it’s time for some work on making XMPP sexy.
That's true and certainly the "global protocol" for lack of a better term on iOS is iMessage. Either using a phone # or email it doesn't matter, and they managed to get 95% of the people all talking to each other.
<Insert speculation about the total # of iMessage users being more than possibly either Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn>
That said, although people might be wary of the dominant messaging platform coming from the OS vendor, I don't see how Google can really connect everyone unless they are the ones who do it.
If only their messaging strategy was consistent - and not half assed, they might get somewhere.
iMessage is only popular because it functions exactly the same as SMS on an iphone aside from the color of your chat bubble, and the software defaults to it over SMS. If Apple separated iMessage and SMS into two apps, it would have failed.
What's crazy, is google is still trying to figure out how to get sms/chat/video call into a single app like 7 years later. How can this be so hard to see as adding massive value? my iFriends have had iMessage for half a decade, and I've seen so many chat apps from google I've given up and gone with something else in the mean time.
The saddest part of this to me is that Google had a huge head start with Google Voice which they let languish for years. When I realized I was being silently dropped from group messages because they were MMS and voice couldn't support it (which lead to people thinking I was ignoring them) I moved everything to Apple.
Since then they've released and killed a bunch of chat applications that have all been pretty poor - as an outsider it seems like something is pretty wrong with how they're handling that strategy.
Not sure what you're implying, but that was frankly the only solution if you wanted to create something that could be used by the majority of people with iOS devices.
Proprietary "sugar" on top of standard protocols is almost the de facto answer for how Apple operates these days. Their efforts to get the extra stuff past standards bodies (so that everyone can use it) is at times hit or miss, but I'm increasingly convinced the overall approach is correct.
Why Google can't do this on Android is an open question.
Before iMessage and Hangouts there was Meego which was an attempt to bring back the chat applications on smart phones with an XMPP client, but the protocols weren't good enough (and the app wasn't very good either).
Without mobile first considerations you'd lose history or miss messages on the phone making it pretty unreliable. When anything else came along that was better it was used instead. Any network advantage XMPP had quickly died as people moved on to things that actually worked (most of which were walled gardens).
Text messaging, in the pre-iPhone era, is what killed IM... and then it “came back” so to speak as a contentious feature of mobile phones (iMessage, Hangouts).
Text messaging won because everyone had a phone number and smart-phones/data services were seen by the masses as unnecessary or a luxury. When most people send a “text” they’re sending an IM be it over WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, Hangouts (or whatever google’s is these days), Slack, etc so it really does suck we’ve gone full circle ended up where we started.
From the sounds of it, looks like it’s time for some work on making XMPP sexy.