For many expatriates, keeping in touch with their families back home without spending tonnes of money on talk time is done through the free apps.

Free messaging on the mobile is a dinosaur, what people want is quality video calls where you can share your child’s birthday or graduation with the grandparents on the other side of the sea. (Indian grandma after seeing the degree on Skype: “Good, she has got her degree now. When are you getting her married?”)

When my mother-in-law got an iPad, the most important thing was not how easy it was to message us, but how to send a sticker on Viber. Her home companion showed her how and then she started sending stickers to all of us, and she got mad when I did not send her any stickers back. “I sent you two stickers yesterday,” she would remind me pointedly. Most of her stickers were of bears only wearing red shirts, or a dinosaur eating a slice of chocolate cake and I was not sure how I should respond to that. Communicating through stickers has never been my strong point.

Then messaging became passe for her and she found instant videos fascinating. “See, this is the tooth the dentist pulled out,” she would say, pointing to a gap in her front teeth. “I have heard horror stories of the wrong teeth being pulled out,” she said cackling at the thought of the poor victim looking in a handheld mirror given by the nurse after the procedure.

Then she wanted me to go to the balcony so that she could see the walkway at the back of our apartment that is shaded by trees. At precisely the moment I stepped out with the laptop held in front of me, a girl came by on a bicycle and stopped and listened curiously while I spoke to my mother-in-law’s head on the screen.

Then my nephew in Oman sent me a WhatsApp message, asking me to download imo, so that we could do make calls as Skype does not work there. As I started downloading, the app wanted to know everything that’s going on in my life. It wanted access to all my contact emails, phone numbers, all the pictures I had taken, the GPS tracking spot of where I lived. The only thing it hesitated in asking me was my bank account numbers.

I asked my son whether it was safe to allow it full access and he said it was fine, but not to allow it to download any third-party application without my permission. When I checked carefully before clicking ‘Yes’, I found a box tick marked that said I wished to download an amazing video editing app for free for a month.

A week after I downloaded the app after un-checking the box, a young woman came up to me in our office canteen and asked as to why do I keep sending her message requests to chat and never answer. A chill went through the back of my neck to my spine as I wondered what was I being accused of and when did I harass that woman? Then I remembered the stupid app and after what seemed like some unsatisfactory explanations, I checked my phone.

And sure enough, everybody I know in this town was sent a message with the words to the effect, ‘Hi, let’s chat sometime’. It was also sent to my doctor in Dubai, my bank manager in my hometown in India, my boss, and my maid. After the mass mailing of messages, I found I had been invited to groups that discuss some really weird stuff and not wanting to become a wanted person, I deleted all my free apps.

But someone said recently that WhatsApp may soon bring on free video calls ...