AIM truly became useless. Everyone got phones and texted instead of using computers. AIM was popular before every person had a mobile phone. It wasn’t really AIMs fault. Mobile phones came out and they were too slow to have a decent application. For a few years phones didn’t have the ability at all to download applications. In that span of time AIM was completely replaced by texting. They may have been starting from zero again by the time iPhone and Android popularized app downloads.