MESSENGER REALITIES: NOW AND STILL TO COME

messaging
ANALYST BENEDICT EVANS HAS RECENTLY SHARED HIS THOUGHTS ON WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS FOR MESSENGERS.

After WhatsApp became Facebook’s property Evans expressed his opinion on the fact that the given market doesn’t have a winner yet, however, the smartphone has entirely become a social platform. A remarkable fact is that the biggest messenger out there, WhatsApp, has the most narrow set of functions, while Kakao, for example, manages to stay in the fight with the competitors only thanks to an abundance of special features.

The analyst supported his theory on the development of messengers with the following thoughts:

  • Messengers do not have to establish the social aspect from scratch, since they have access to your contact list.

  • It is easier to upload photos directly into the messenger’s gallery, rather than onto a separate website.

  • Push-notifications help stay focused when checking emails.

  • Most importantly, according to the analyst, is that every application has its very own icon on the home screen.

    The next big question raised by the analyst is: how many messengers will grow to become something more than just a means of instant messaging?

It is not that simple to tell the real state of affairs on the market, because the information put up by developers is often very vague in nature. They only tend to report the number of registered accounts or the monthly audience. It’d be much more interesting to see, say, the hourly user activity reports. Now, if the data on the geographical audience distribution is only slightly misleading – given that WhatsApp has long since gone beyond the US and Asia, Facebook Messenger is spreading evenly, and Line and WeChat are sharing Asia — then the search for any sort of information on iMessage’s stats will surely enough bring you to a dead end.

Benedict is rather ambiguous in this matter because he thinks that, perhaps, it doesn’t make sense to select a winner, since every app is used for a different goal. In line with the conclusions, the analyst even included Instagram in his list of messengers, predicting further growth of similar applications that have excellent functions, like Snapchat. In the future, the main revolution should take place in the app positioning psychology, and not only in the mechanics and the “cream filling”.

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