If you listen closely you can hear the final, wheezing breaths of Mxit as the number of users plummet. We covered those numbers last Friday, monthly active users having fallen from 4.9 million in 2014 to 2.7 million in 2015.

Now with News24 having closed the comments section (one wonders where these people are now getting their kicks, are they starting slanging matches on street corners with strangers?) people are required to email their thoughts in. This has led to *gasp* actual insight and constructive thought, with these three below published on a Fin24 article:

Fin24 user Ashford wrote:

“I have not used Mxit since 2013. The platform became overloaded with unnecessary functions that it made it difficult to navigate through the platform. Instead of fast tracking development on the platform to beat competition, Mxit chose to be stubborn and it has paid a heavy price for that.”

Fin24 user Christien wrote:

“I deleted Mxit in 2010 already! Over rated! Was a good app back in the day when that was the only app to use! Still started with mxit 3.0 hahahahaha!!”

Fin24 user Corus said Mxit risks becoming extinct:

I find it very obsolete… . I think they lost their opportunity to WeChat. It makes no sense to have both WeChat and Mxit on the same device, let alone both account for one individual.

For light chatting, WhatsApp is doing a good job, and for deep interaction with both friends and corporations, one can’t look further away from WeChat, in fact, it’s only a matter of time WeChat overtakes WhatsApp in the number of unique users since anything that one can do on WhatsApp, WeChat can do better and more.”

For what it’s worth I’ll wade into this one and add my two cents worth. Mxit were definitely guilty of neglecting to create apps for smartphones, perhaps a sign that they miscalculated just how rapidly that market would expand here at home. The same is true across Africa, smartphone users growing a rate few had predicted. This emerging market was thus drawn to the likes of Whatsapp and WeChat, those platforms establishing themselves as the go-to messaging apps before Mxit had a chance to play catch up.

And to think we used to pay for each text message, crafting every word to ensure maximum information in 160 characters.

[source:fin24]