Fring

» see fring.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

fring was on my radar around 2008 because there was a window of about three years where if you wanted to make a voice call from your phone over wi-fi without paying turkcell or vodafone per minute, fring was the only credible app that worked across both symbian and the brand-new iphone. msn was still on every laptop in the country. skype was the call protocol everyone wanted to use. fring was the bridge that put skype on a phone before skype itself had a working mobile app.

the company was started in tel aviv in 2006. the founders had come out of cellebrite. the technical bet was that real-time voice over wi-fi on a mobile cpu would work if you wrote the codec carefully enough, and they were right about that two or three years earlier than anyone else. on a nokia e71 in 2008 the call quality was better than the gsm channel beneath it, provided you had a stable wireless hotspot. that was a real product before whatsapp had voice and before skype had a mobile app worth installing.

the catch was that fring did not have its own user base. it federated to other people's networks. you could see your msn contacts inside fring because fring was logging into msn for you. same with google talk, aim, yahoo messenger, icq, and most importantly skype. for two years that was the whole point: one phone app to reach everyone you already chatted with on the desktop.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

in july 2010 fring shipped iphone video calling for ios 4 by going over the skype protocol. skype blocked fring's access within a week and accused fring of unauthorized use of the api. fring fired back with a press release saying skype had been a coward. the public fight was loud, the press loved it, and the practical result was that fring lost skype, which was most of why people had installed fring in the first place.

the same year apple shipped facetime and gave away mobile video calling for free between iphones over wi-fi. whatsapp added voice messaging in 2013 and full voice calling in 2015, by which point it had 500 million users. fring's reason to exist was being eaten on three sides at once.

~ the postmortem ~

genband, an enterprise voip vendor based in texas, bought fring on september 12, 2013 for about fifty million dollars. the announcement framed the deal as letting genband build white-label otts for carriers who wanted to offer their own whatsapp competitor. the consumer fring app kept running but stopped getting updates after february 27, 2014. it was finally unpublished from google play on january 29, 2017. genband itself merged with sonus networks the same year to become ribbon communications.

~ what got buried with it ~

the model fring tried to ship in 2006, one phone app that aggregates all the chat networks you already use, never came back at scale. trillian and pidgin did it on the desktop and stayed niche. the smartphone era closed the protocols off behind official client apps and tos restrictions that no third party could safely federate against. fring was the last app to try the aggregator move at mainstream scale, lose the case, and disappear into a carrier b2b product line that nobody downloads on purpose.

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