MY FAVOURITE APP OF ALL TIME

It was in 2012 when I got my first phone. It was a feature phone meaning it had a keypad. I was so excited about having my first phone. It had a very small screen, just half the size of a passport-size photo! Today when I looked at my smartphone, I wonder was it me who was using that feature phone?

Even after using so many smartphones and high-end mobile applications, my first mobile phone is quite special. It was a Motorola flip handset. Though there were a few applications that allowed me to call and text people, it was still the best. There were no games applications on my Motorola phone. One of the best things about that phone was that in case, I received a message or a missed call, the tiny screen over the outer side of the flip, used to blink. There were tiny icons for showing battery life, messages, and calls.

I was so fascinated by this feature back then, that I would often ignore my incoming calls just to see the missed call icon blinking. After using it for over a year, I switched to a Samsung Champ handset. However, this was for a short time as my father lost it in a crowd. The reason why I switched to the new phone was that I wanted to experience what it was like to use a touch-screen phone. Once I asked my uncle to buy a new phone for me and he agreed and bought a Samsung Champ.

The Samsung champ had an in-built gaming application that was all about collecting diamonds. I often played that game and it was one of my favorite pastimes. Now since it was my first touch-screen handset, I loved playing that game by scrolling through the screen.

But no other game can compete with the Zombie HQ game that I started playing when I was pursuing my graduation. Back then I was using one of the Motorola smartphones. The game was so interesting that I could play it for 2-3 hours at a stretch. The game was all about hunting down zombies and killing them with some high-end weapons and collecting points. At first, the game seemed a bit difficult to me but then I aced it.

While killing the vampire, my fighters used to yell and grunt and I liked it. This is when I realized how games and other applications make us addicted to them. Soon, I uninstalled the application. This is when my friends persuaded me to use Instagram as it was the thing that allegedly made us cool. Eventually, I started using Instagram and I still use it.

Still, I am not a big fan of Instagram even though I use it every day to watch cute dog videos and scroll through my news feed. The only application that I genuinely admire was Hike Messenger. Its servers were shut down this year in January and trust me, I miss Hike every day. It was such a cool application but it didn’t get as much fame as WhatsApp and Instagram enjoy.

The best thing about Hike was that it had so many stickers. I mean you could type a word or sentence and you may see stickers in the auto-suggestion. The chat theme of the application was so vibrant. There were plenty of chat themes and they were undisputedly beautiful. Not only this, one could hide their private and important chat through the Hide Chat feature. The feature kept the chat hidden and no people could find it except the user himself/herself. The notification ringtone along with the feature to send offline messages was so good.

Even today I wish for the makers of Hike to make a comeback and start afresh. I haven’t uninstalled the application from my phone and I don’t think I would ever like to uninstall it. However, when I change my phone, I would be erasing all my data from my current phone, and then Hike will be gone forever and this makes me sad.

My friends often ask me to just let go of Hike and I don’t know why I am still not ready to do this. I know this is stupid. But I prefer holding on to this hope of seeing Hike back on the Google Playstore.

How true it is, that we hold onto certain things in life even when we know they don’t exist anymore!!! Does this make you wonder and ponder about it?

Well! Then keep doing that…