WhatsApp gained many users at first by running on most of the early feature phones (largely Java ME if I’m not mistaken). These days you target two platforms, iOS and Android, and you’re done, but back then running everywhere was a big feature.
Interesting article, I find domestication analogy quite apt.
Outside the US, texting was/is charged per-message rather than unlimited texting. It was/is very expensive to send thousands of texts vs the fixed-rate data plans.
I think it was also a timing issue. Paying per SMS was a thing in the US when texting was novel ($0.10/SMS or so, IIRC?) but the US seemed to move to unlimited texting sooner than most places. However, today in the European country I live in it's almost impossible to find plans that don't include unlimited SMS, but it perhaps happened "too late" to take over messaging now that online platforms offer effectively free international messaging and calling as well.
As a European teenager I always laughed at America for having to pay for SMS receipt. Ours were free and sending was free up to some ridiculously huge amount.
Then I started dating a girl from another town and got a $500 sms bill. Oops
This was before data, WAP was barely a thing. Circa 2004. We texted our days away at school. Got very good at touch typing under the desk.
It also depended on your plan, the cheaper the plan, the less freebies you had and parents never got their kids the top spec plan. My parents only got me a cell-phone with a pre-paid SIM for "emergencies" and didn't have enough credit on it to text too many people so IM over yahoo! messenger on the PC was used by teens for chatting at the time.
Growing up in Eastern Europe with a basic cell-phone plan, before the days of all you can talk/text, it was common to "beep"[1] people when you were on a prepaid SIM and had little or no credit on it.
[1]Calling someone and quickly hanging up after hearing the phone "ring" or "beep", and hope the person on the other end heard it and cares enough about you to spend their dime calling you back. It was also a sign of stinginess/poverty if you did this but it was very popular due to the high cost and low wages at the time.
The same thing was possible with PCs too! All the way to Windows XP, there was a built-in dial program (HyperTerminal) that let you send files and chat over the phone line directly, outside the Internet, and only the person initiating the connection would be the one paying, since it was fundamentally just a phone call.
It was also awesome because it bypassed the Internet. It could work if you were censored, didn't have an ISP or if the Internet was completely shutdown (I used it for exactly that when Egypt shutdown the Internet in Jan 2011).
Similar memories here, but I got very creative to fit inside the free SMS limit. The limit was something you'd ordinarily think ridiculous even on cheap plans, IIRC I had 1000 texts/month in the plan, and the equivalent for pre-paids was also very cheap. It turns out 1000 text messages a month is enough for everyone except teenagers in love.
Also I remember people in my circles laughing at Americans, because we believed that the US doesn't have SMS service for some reason.
It used to be around 8 cents back home per text. When you're in love, 1000 messages for 80$ was more than the average monthly wage back then..luckily most teens were on pre-paid plans.
Interesting article, I find domestication analogy quite apt.