UppTalk (Yuilop)

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

~ the last words ~

Yuilop had its moment in spain and mexico. It never had a turkish one. By the time free texting mattered to me, whatsapp had already taken the entire country, and every second-tier free-sms app was fighting over the ground whatsapp had not already covered, which was almost none. Yuilop was a real product with real users, just not near me.

It started in barcelona in november 2010, built by jochen doppelhammer, who had run the mobile carrier simyo. The trick that set it apart was the cloud phone number. Most free-calling apps only worked app-to-app, so both people needed the software installed. Yuilop gave you an actual number and could deliver a text to someone who had never heard of it, using earned credits to cover the cost of reaching outside the network.

At its height it claimed around five million users across more than a hundred countries, rebranded from yuilop to upptalk in 2013, and looked for a while like it might be one of the survivors. It was not.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

The idea was good in 2011. Sms still cost money in most of the world, phone minutes cost more, and a service that let you route around both by giving you a free number felt like the future. Yuilop leaned into the reach-anyone angle, the thing that made it more than a walled garden. For a couple of years it grew and expanded into new markets on the strength of it.

~ the fall ~

The problem was that the free number was expensive to run and hard to make money from, and the market it was competing in had one winner already forming. Whatsapp did not give you a cloud number, but it did give you free messaging to everyone you knew, and it did it so simply that nobody cared about the missing features. By 2014 the money ran out. Upptalk entered insolvency proceedings in october of that year.

~ how it ended ~

It did not die cleanly. After the 2014 insolvency the app kept running in a diminished form under the upptalk name for a while, the way these things do when there is still a server bill being paid by someone. By 2017 the service was discontinued and even the domain was let go. What was left of the company reportedly turned toward education software, which is the corporate equivalent of changing your name and moving to another city.

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