This is why it's annoying to me that so many people use Messenger.
You know what I can use text anyone, anytime without having to worry about ads? My phone.
I feel like there's a downward trend of companies using free stuff to "hook" people and then just feed them an inferior product over and over and over again (more ads, etc). It's not just creating worse products, but it's creating worse customers (who don't understand actual costs when they see other products that are "free").
What happened to just "paying for x, get x." As a customer, I miss those business models and as a business, I miss those customers.
And that's the reason I only contact people via email if I can help it!
Open, decentralized, accessible, and not locked in to some vendors shitty whims. I get why people don't like it, but until we come up with a good distributed and decentralized alternative, I'll stick with email thank.
Anecdote, but this past year, some new experience with a few people showed me part of the apparent reason for the dominance of Messenger: Discovery.
You meet someone. You want to follow up with them, for whatever reason. Most people have a public enough profile on Facebook that Messenger is the obvious answer. And, like Facebook, "everyone" is on it. Even if they conduct their more personal and intimate social media interaction on other platforms. To "reach out and touch someone", ping them on FB/Messenger.
Not saying I like giving FB that position. But, they currently appear to indeed have and dominate it.
P.S. A frequent circumstance is a friend or acquaintance of a friend or a coworker. Someone at a party. Etc. Your respective social graphs are already grazing if not overlapping, so connecting the dots on FB is trivial.
Maybe I'm just using the wrong app, but as far as I know texting on Android is garbage. Plus having to get phone numbers is annoying when we're already connected on FB. And phone numbers are randomly loseable when getting new phones, and I can't access my texts from my computer, and I lose texts if I get a new phone, and attaching media barely works, and messages get broken apart at a character limit, etc etc. I'd rather use Messenger any day.
Of course I don't like that it's controlled by FB, because I hate FB, but I'm probably going to keep using it until it's replaced by another free social media platform that 'everyone' is on by default.
Hm. I really dislike Google's ecosystem, so I don't think I'm interested in switching to it. And my initial experiences with hangouts were super negative.
I'm using an app (messenger?) that just puts a slightly better UI on Android texting, but it's still pretty bad. I should look into using Telegram, though.
By far the biggest gripe with texting is that it's not persistent across devices. That's a core requirement that seems like it should have been solved a decade ago.
Realistically, how would Google sync texts between devices without sending your texts to Google? And once you're doing that, why not use Hangouts, which does, in fact, do pretty good cross-device sync?
I ask as a fellow Google-avoider; I think your competing requirements are asking for an impossible thing.
Apple's iMessage does this, each device has a public/private key that is shared. When you send a message it is encrypted with all of the recipient's devices public private keys. If the device is not on at the time Apple holds on to the encrypted message but cannot read it because the private key is stored on the device. The only downside to this is that you cannot sync old messages to a new device.
I never understood why this model (giving an app away entirely for free) wasn't considered predatory pricing. Especially for the companies who can bankroll a business with a loss for a long enough time to gobble up market share.
nothing happened, its just psychology. "predictably irrational" by dan ariely does a great explanation of free vs paid.
I dont like many of those business models. Its basically push everybody out of game by offering a great product for free and then when nobody is there make it worse.
This sure opens a space for a new player, but this new player will just play the same game ( offer something for free then make it worse and so on )
You know what I can use text anyone, anytime without having to worry about ads? My phone.
I feel like there's a downward trend of companies using free stuff to "hook" people and then just feed them an inferior product over and over and over again (more ads, etc). It's not just creating worse products, but it's creating worse customers (who don't understand actual costs when they see other products that are "free").
What happened to just "paying for x, get x." As a customer, I miss those business models and as a business, I miss those customers.