It was already a challenge back in those days. I ran the Nokia N9 for a while, and within a year it went from being amazing at messaging due to its messaging app mixing different XMPP providers in one interface (Google Talk, Facebook Messenger, SMS, etc in a single interface) to everyone in the industry suddenly giving up on that and only supporting in-app messaging.

There were valiant attempts to create open source versions of popular apps, but those efforts were always intentionally sabotaged by those providers.