Six or seven years ago, the well-known and popular today short messaging clients for smartphones, led by WhatsApp, were just in their infancy, and ICQ was in vogue. Then many of us, probably, only dreamed that in the future it would be possible to completely abandon SMS correspondence and switch to ICQ. Today it is a reality – text messages in SMS format are practically not used, and most people with smartphones are switching to communication, mainly in WhatsApp, as well as in other applications. And here's what I want to say: it turns out that the times when correspondence on all issues on a smartphone was carried out via text messages, SMS, had their advantages.
Quite recently, once again unlocking the screen of my smartphone to open some program, I caught myself thinking that I have four messaging clients on my desktop! At the same time, I prefer to organize the home screen so that only the most used applications are outside the folders, and everything that I use daily, but not constantly, is sorted into thematic folders. However, neither WhatsApp, nor Telegram, nor Facebook Messenger, nor even, sadly, Skype, I can not put it into a folder, calling it, for example, 'Communication'. Because I need each of these applications every day more often than the others, hence the location of their shortcuts on the main desktop, outside the folders.
I use Telegram to correspond with friends and acquaintances, I was lucky, and I successfully 'dragged' almost my entire social circle into this program, because I consider it the most convenient and flexible. That is, the transition from WhatsApp to Telegram had purely practical goals. However, I also use WhatsApp all the time, because we have a working chat there. Facebook Messenger seems to be out of place here, but no. A lot of people 'sit' in Facebook and prefer to write messages directly on the page of this social network, mostly they are work colleagues and just some acquaintances, such messages come just in Facebook Messenger . Finally, Skype. Despite the fact that the program for Android is terrible and I sincerely do not recommend installing and using it in order not to waste my nerves, I have to use Skype every day for my work. Over the years of the existence of this service, many people have switched to it and it is impossible to just throw it away Skype now.
I have detailed the purpose of each program for my case, to show you that it is not a whim to have many clients for messaging, but a necessity for me. I am sure that I am far from alone, many people sooner or later have to connect some third-party in parallel with the main client, because they are friends, because they are colleagues, or simply because some acquaintance is using that other client.
Having freed ourselves from the attachment to expensive and inconvenient text messages on phones and smartphones, we got a convenient and almost only WhatsApp for several years, but this time did not last long and today the situation is such that many need to use two, three or even more clients for messaging. Yes, it is not difficult, to install all applications, but still this is not what, probably, many expected from the development of this direction. And if earlier, in the days of Symbian and the first smartphones, universal applications appeared that made it possible to drive accounts of different services and communicate within one program (I can immediately recall imo, but there were others), now this is not the case, each text messaging client is individual.
Now attention, a question: do you think that it would be better if the development of text messaging services stopped a couple of years ago, when WhatsApp had no competitors yet, or does the development of alternatives as today seem to you right?