Maxwell Baum

Listening to the Vergecast with @davidpierce and Eric Migicovsky from Pebble. Unorganized thoughts…

- Dude I miss the Pebble. I’m starting to become a watch boy and I think I’m going to pull it out of storage and add it to the rotation.

- I was in college from 2013 to 2017 and GroupMe was THE group messaging app. It is a complete piece of shit but had a stranglehold on my college campus - I’m still stuck in some old GroupMes from that time.

Oct 16, 2023 at 2:15pmMastodon for iOS
Show threadMaxwell BaumOct 16, 2023
- When talking about iMessage’s dominance in the US, the piece of insight I always hear missed is the prevalence of data plans in the EU vs US.
Data plans were very expensive and you generally only had one if you had a smartphone, for the rest of us, we were all using SMS to communicate. Even if you did have a smartphone and data plan, they could still be super limited. My first smartphone in 2011 (Palm Pixi Plus) had a data cap of 150 MB per month - no way was I using a third party chat app.
Show threadMaxwell BaumOct 16, 2023

And this was the case with everyone I interacted with - we all just used text really. Some of us used chat apps on the computer, and I knew one other person with a BlackBerry who I could BBM, but on mobile it was SMS/MMS.

Compare that with Europe where data plans were more accessible and things like BBM, WhatsApp could proliferate.

I still think text messaging is king in the US - all Apple did is put enhanced features into the normal texting app. No one changed behaviors.