this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
270 points (95.9% liked)
Technology
59108 readers
3169 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This seems a bit revisionist. Everyone had an amount of smses per month that were free in their contract.
People switched to whatsapp because it was better than sms.
Not everybody, and not infinitely far back. There was definitely a period where there were no free texts included (although I do think that by the iPhone introduction many did have it, but still not all!)
its good to be clear that we are talking about a time period when people migrated to whatapp, and the reasoning for migrating to whatsapp. and how the 'text for free' thing wasn't a big motivator, (nor was it a new idea)
deleted
And also because Whatsapp was available on every platform, from the dominant ones at the time (Nokia and Blackberry) to the newcomers (iOS, Android, even Windows Phone and more obscure ones like Samsung's whatever it was called).
Samsung had bada os then worked with intel and the tizen foundation on tizen
wasn’t it the long distance thing? charged for sending SMS outside of your network or something. I recall whatsapp was the way to text your parents from one country in to another, even in the EU.
I know for a fact my fam adopted almost a decade ago, so we can text from USA to EU to SA to Canada. Family all over and it’s free.