this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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There's reasons people moved away from multi-network apps like Trillian and Gaim/Pidgin... They were always playing catch-up with the official clients, and frequently broke when there were server-side changes. Protocols for proprietary messaging apps were (and still are) undocumented. I'm not convinced they've actually solved any of these issues.
I think they mostly died when GChat turned off XMPP support and became a walled garden.
If Beeper does become a successful business though, there'll be a full time development team "playing catch-up" with money behind them. It's interesting if you read this that they're rolling out features ahead of the message providers in some cases!
They're also leveraging some existing infrastructure. Beeper is built on Matrix which does a lot of the heavy lifting for them.
Most of the protocols supported by Trillian were walled gardens too - AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, etc were all proprietary.
Trillian had paid full-time developers too. I'm not sure what'd they'd be doing differently to what Trillian did.
I think one difference is that the rate of change in chat apps has slowed down dramatically. When was the last time one of the major apps added a new feature you can't live without anymore? So it might be easier now to keep up.
Huh, in my opinion people simply moved away, because the underlying messenger were used less and less. Once everyone ran around with smartphones using WhatsApp, fewer and fewer people cared about MSN, ICQ, etc.
Not "everyone" uses Whatsapp though - I deleted mine after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and I know of a few others who also did so. As far as I know Whatsapp has still never changed their T&C to pass metadata upstream to Facebook.
This is really region dependent. In Europe (or at least the Netherlands) almost everybody with a smartphone uses Whatsapp
Talk to anyone in latin america, you must use whatsapp. There's no avoiding it. Some have tried Telegram a while ago, but most have reverted back to their usual whatsapp or facebook messenger. It's crazy.
I can vouch for this in a small town of like 5k people in zacatecas, Mexico. Everyone including government and businesses uses WhatsApp. You see the logo with phone numbers all over the place.
Same experience in Argentina and Paraguay
I am in a different part of the world, and what you are saying is also true here for the older generation, while the younger one has no escape from Telegram.
No, not regionally, as Whatsapp is probably used most. It is more individuals who decided not to use Facebook related products. Luckily, about 90% of my contacts are on Telegram. It's a bit sad that a proprietary product that leaks metadata could be so widely used. If there was going to be a single "one product" I'd rather prefer that to be an open standard protocol. Those protocols exist, but are not in broad use. But the W3C standard for social networking, really needs to also cover chat messengers.
Now? Sure. Back then WhatsApp (before it was bought by Facebook) was replacing SMS nearly everywhere.
People moved around, but often still use several apps even today. You might have a "main" app you use with friends (this used to be MSN Messenger for me back in the day; now it's Facebook Messenger), but there may be other people you chat to that use other apps. Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Wechat, Viber, Signal, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Skype, Kik... I feel like there's actually more major apps today than there used to be.
On the behalf of your mentioned problem. I don't know if it still holds as the eu's digital market act now forces "gatekeeper" messaging apps to open their api.
Afaik, that isn't in effect yet, but will become a major factor next year.