Files were extremely small, often under 5MB for a full song or short clip, making them perfect for phones with limited memory Accessibility:

It wasn't just music videos. It was the first wave of mobile adult content, viral clips (remember the "Crazy Frog"?), and bootlegged movie summaries. That 3gp file was the only way to watch a scene from The Matrix on the bus.

Why did it work so well? The 3gp codec used video encoding. This codec was designed to drop details ruthlessly. It would group pixels into large blocks. If a scene had fast movement, it would turn into a mosaic of colored squares. But to a 15-year-old in 2006, that wasn't a bug; it was just mobile video .