MobileChat demonstrates the wrong way to release an iPhone IM app, gives game to Beejive

After almost two months, the perpetually dysfunctional MobileChat has finally released an update to its instant messaging iPhone app. And you know what? It’s too late. I waited forever for an update and now I don’t care.

MobileChat had the opportunity to own cross-platform instant messaging on the iPhone. When it launched at the beginning of August, its primary competition came from apps called Palringo and IM+. They’re both free and passable applications, but each suffered from far-from-ideal interfaces and a range of other faults. Palringo, for example, pointlessly forced users to sign up for Palringo accounts, while IM+ tended to crash while in use. Users of both complained that the apps automatically signed them off when closed and neither had earned more than an average of three stars.

MobileChat appeared promising to tie together my favorite instant messaging services and do it right. Its interface would be elegant, it would support free multimedia text messaging and best of all, it would offer the option to keep you signed in when the application closed. The catch? Unlike the competition, it would cost $2.99.

It didn’t seem to matter. Not to me, not to the swarm of other fools who, like me, downloaded it on sight and made it the 35th most popular paid app within its first two days in the store. But, of course, the servers went down.

Problem was (and still is), they never really came back up. On the MobileChat blog, the app’s developers expressed remorse. The issue, they wrote, was that they had expected 100 sales per day in the first week and got many, many more.

At first, most users were supportive. Commenters wrote things like “Great app guys! Can’t wait for those servers to come back!” and “I was a bit peeved at first, but your honesty and forthrightness has really struck a chord.” But over the next two months, that support waned. Saverio and Shaun wrote that they were working day and night to bring more servers online. Then they brought in outside help. Then they wrote that the whole architecture had been done wrong. Meanwhile, the app, too, was riddled with bugs. If we were lucky enough to get online, we found that buddies who appeared to be available were not — a fact we could appreciate just long enough for MobileChat to crash.

Almost 600 reviews later, MobileChat has a two-star rating. Its rank among apps has plummeted to 883. The new version claims to fix problems with the app, the servers still don’t work.

Last week, Beejive, an IM app already popular on the Blackberry, went on sale for a hefty $15.99 in the iTunes store. Beejive has all the features MobileChat had promised, plus some handy extras. After 240 reviews, it has 4.5 stars and is the 14th most popular social networking app, despite its price.

I bought it on sight.