Messaging apps (a.k.a. "Social messaging" or "chat applications") are apps and platforms that enable messaging, many of which started around social networking platforms, but many of which have now developed into broad platforms enabling status updates, chatbots, payments and conversational commerce (e-commerce via chat).
Some examples of popular messaging apps include WhatsApp, China's WeChat and QQ Messenger, Viber, Line, Snapchat, Korea's KakaoTalk, Google's Hangouts, Blackberry Messenger, and Vietnam's Zalo. Slack focuses on messaging and file sharing for work teams. Some social networking services offer messaging services as a component of their overall platform, such as Facebook's Facebook Messenger, along with Instagram and Twitter's direct messaging functions.
Messaging apps are the most widely used smartphone apps with in 2018 over 1.3 billion monthly users of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, 980 million monthly active users of WeChat and 843 million monthly active users of QQ Mobile.
Video Messaging apps
In comparison to SMS and instant messaging
Messaging apps differ from the previous generation of instant messaging platforms like the defunct AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, and Windows Live Messenger, in that they are primarily used via mobile apps
on smartphones as opposed to personal computers, although some messaging apps offer web-based versions or software for PC operating systems.
As people upgraded in the 2010s from feature phones to smartphones, they moved from traditional calling and SMS (which are paid services) to messaging apps which are free or only incur small data charges.
The United States is notably different to most of the rest of the world - SMS remains popular because it is usually included free in monthly phone bundles, and Apple's iMessage is popular, and uses SMS for messages to non-Apple phones. While SMS volumes in some countries like Denmark, Spain and Singapore dropped up to two-thirds from 2011 to 2013, in the U.S. they only dropped around one quarter.
Maps Messaging apps
Features
Messaging apps each have some of the following features:
- Chat
- One-on-one chat
- Group chat
- Broadcast lists
- Chatbots (including "bot in group chats")
- "Smart replies" (suggested replies to incoming messages provided by Google's Reply platform )
- Calls
- Voice calls
- Video calls
- Audio alerts (on Line)
- File sharing
- Games
- "Mini Programs" (e.g. WeChat Mini Program)
- News discovery (e.g. Snapchat Discover)
- Payments or mobile wallet, e.g. WeChat Pay which processes much of the Chinese mobile payment volume of 5 trillion USD (2016)
- Personal (cloud) storage
- Push notifications
- Status updates (WhatsApp Status, WeChat Moments)
- Stickers
- Virtual assistant, e.g. Google Assistant in Google Allo
Reply by Google is a different kind of messaging app that lets users insert suggested replies to messages that they receive in other messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, Slack and Hangouts.
Conversational commerce
Conversational commerce refers to e-commerce through the use of messaging, whether chatbots or via live (human) agents. In China, WeChat - at its core a messaging app, but also letting merchants display their goods in mobile Web pages and via social feeds - has grown strongly. By 2013 e-commerce in China had overtaken that of the U.S. In 2016, Facebook announced its Facebook Messenger chatbot platform, heralding the arrival of conversational commerce via the most widely used messaging app in the world outside China. More than 34,000 businesses had opened shop on Messenger by August 2017. In September 2017 WhatsApp announced the pilot of its new Enterprise solution - the first time large companies would be able to provide customer service to users via WhatsApp at scale. Among the first companies announcing service on the enterprise platform were airlines KLM and Aeroméxico, Latin American online travel agency Despegar.com and online retailer Linio.
List of messaging apps
Consumer apps
Discontinued consumer apps
Workplace group chat apps
Google and Microsoft as well as Slack provide apps that enable groups to chat, share files and hold group video calls. They are mainly targeted at workplaces rather than individual consumers for private use.
See also
- Comparison of instant messaging clients
- Conversational commerce
- Instant messaging
- List of virtual communities with more than 100 million active users
References
43. http://www.apkstub.com/2017/10/whats-app.html
Source of article : Wikipedia
0 Comments