Services like WhatsApp and Telegram have all but erased this phenomenom in the rest of the world. My friends and I have been WhatsApping up a storm even before

Services like WhatsApp and Telegram have all but erased this phenomenom in the rest of the world. My friends and I have been WhatsApping up a storm even before the first iPhone became available in my country. This was pre-android, believe it or not, WhatsApp used to host JARs you could download for your Symbian dumb phone. Before WhatsApp we used a service called MxIT. For me and most of my peers, non-SMS mobile chat dates back as far as early 2000s. For all my teenage and adult life, I've never once sent or received an SMS in a social context. My SMS inbox is 100٪ banking transaction alerts, OTPs and spam.