2GO’s Ascension and Fall

2go is a free mobile social networking application developed in Cape Town, South Africa by 2go Interactive Ltd. 2go is compatible with over 1,500 devices, including feature phones, Android, BlackBerry OS, and BlackBerry 10 smartphones.

After dominating the African social media sector for five years, 2Go is no longer as prominent as it once was. The app is still alive and well, and it’s still usable. However, all of the users have vanished.

What went wrong?

Some people may tell you that they simply “grew up” on the platform and that it is no longer a part of their lives. Others were perplexed by what had occurred, but they realized they needed to move on to something greater.

I decided to delve deeper into the subject of 2Go’s demise. And I realized that its demise was largely due to its inability to adapt, as well as the rise of Whatsapp. Here are the four issues that contributed to 2Go’s demise.

There was a period when 2go was quite popular in Nigeria, even ahead of Facebook. But that is no longer the case. So, how did 2go come to a halt? It’s possible that 2go’s demise is linked to BBM’s. BBM stands for BlackBerry Messenger, and its demise can be ascribed to two factors: “lack of innovation” and “inability to adapt to change.”

Major Reasons Why 2go Fell:

• Lack of Innovation and Inability to Adapt to Changes

“Survival is not of the fittest or strongest, but of those who can adapt to changes in their ecosystem,” according to a famous biologist. When 2go first launched, it quickly became the buzz of the town, as no one had ever utilized a mobile chat platform other than Yahoo Messenger for Desktop. People liked it back then, and you could argue that it was a fantastic duplicate and substitute for Yahoo Messenger on mobile devices. The ‘shared room feature,’ which was similar to Yahoo Messenger, was a unique selling point for 2go. With the explicit elements allowed in the chat rooms, they pushed this to a whole new level. The star rating, on the other hand, was a one-of-a-kind feature, as I recall people staying up all night to boost their star ratings.

2go failed to adapt these two aspects – Data Usage and Push Notification – in a unique way, as it took them three years after Whatsapp’s inception to implement the Push Notification function, which used very little data, after Whatsapp had already jumped ahead in the battle for innovation. One of Whatsapp’s primary selling features was Push Notification.

• Data Usage

If we recall, 2go used a lot of data back then, to the point where carriers created special data plans for it, with access to as little as 5mb. For them, not resolving this issue was a big setback. Then came Whatsapp’s Push Notifications and the ability to deal with them using Very Little Data, something 2go never considered or thought was unimportant.

• Monetizing Policies

The monetary yearly subscription of merely $1, which they swiftly removed because they had extremely smart minds working with them, was a big feature that could have killed Whatsapp. 2go never considered improving this feature by not removing the requirement to purchase credit (Go Credits) in order to access particular rooms and chat, despite the fact that we Africans enjoy freebies. The number of active chat room participation has decreased.

• Recovery and Retention Policies

Due to the inability to alter the phone number provided when enrolling, you had limited access to several functions and people were making new accounts instead of login into their existing accounts, which caused me to lose my enthusiasm for 2go. They should have considered the possibility of line loss or damage.

• Compatibility

Another major stumbling block for 2go was the lack of cross-platform capabilities, as their program was only available on Symbian phones and a few Java phones. This was a feature WhatsApp took into account early on.

It’s simple; to survive, you simply remember two things:

Ability to adapt to behavioral changes and patterns caused by your ecosystem’s competitors.

A good artist creates, but a great artist steals and improves on the work of others.