When I got my first iPhone (iPhone 3G, June 2009) one of the best apps and most frequently used apps I had was ‘eBuddy Messenger’. Did any of you use this / do you remember this?
It was basically a singular messenger and you could add and use multiple accounts at once, for me it was Facebook Messenger, MSN Messenger and AIM. Google Talk, and a few more used to work with it too.
It was a ‘Lite’ app, with something tiny like £2.99 for the Pro version. And that was it, forever! (well, until they binned it).
This was so great back then and it worked beautifully in the delightful way early App Store iPhone apps did. Maybe not as impressively or imaginatively as apps today we’ve become used to, but certainly 100x better than any other dumb / semi-smart phone from the era.
It went away and I’m not too sure why. But having learnt a bit about API calls and costs from the recent Reddit fiasco, I’m starting to think maybe each of those services realised it would be much better if they could be sole app providers for their services (and the tracking / ad serving that went with it).