Facebook Messenger overcame the stage of being a messaging app a week ago. Rumours have proved to be true: Messenger has indeed turned into a platform. So far, Zuckerberg’s creation is far from giants like LINE and WeChat. But, in any case, it is way more diversified than one-dimensional WhatsApp or Viber.
The thirty-eight apps that the iOS version of the Messenger contains can be roughly divided into four categories:
- GIF
- sound
- photo + video
- stickers
The goal of each of them is to make a change to communication in Messenger by spicing it up with new emotions.
If you find GIFs, stickers and other prettifications annoying, this review is definitely not for you.
In the first part of this review, we will look at the apps that deal with GIFs that I’m fond of so much.
GIPHY
Lots of people, even those who do not use Messenger, are familiar with this app. It offers the largest amount of GIFs, which revived this ancient format.
GIPHY + Messenger
After you have installed the app and launched it, you will see the following:
Four tabs below: Home (containing relevant and popular GIFs), Recent, Reactions, and Explore.
Reactions
Here you will find GIFs for over 60 popular types of reactions – from “facepalm” to “rly?!”
Explore
Here you will find plenty of GIFs based on movies, film series, musicians, and animals. Besides, this tab contains all memes and emoticons.
You choose a sticker and send it in two steps:
GIFjam
Here you will find the same GIFs but you will also be able to add texts to them. The choice is not great but I, on the contrary, considered it an advantage. The process of sending is identical to that of GIPHY – choose a category by swiping vertically.
GIFs from a category can be picked with a horizontal swipe:
The key difference from GIPHY is that here you can make a GIF out of your own photo. After tapping the camera icon, you will see the red button that all Instagram users are familiar with: if you just push it, you get a photo taken, if you push and hold it, you film a video.
Ultratext
The most feature-packed app of all we have mentioned here. It is about creating mini slides, on which you can place stickers, smileys, photo or some text.
All parameters can be adjusted: the size and the colour of the text, photo filters, and the location of stickers or smileys. Slides, when processed, are made into a GIF ready to be sent. Besides, the app has loads of paid content, which can be customized to an even greater degree.
This is the result I got after experimenting for a couple of minutes:
The app also offers a search for pictures, in case you do not have the one you need in your library.
GIF
At first sight, it is the same as Giphy. There are selections of GIFs of various categories: reactions, trend, and the Explore tab that we are already familiar with. However, it is hard to call it an exact copy of Giphy for two reasons: there is a Music tab, which very much looks like coubs, and a GIF-keyboard.
If it’s all pretty clear with coubs, then for working with the GIF-keyboard you need to visit the settings.
Here we are rounding up the review of GIP apps. In the coming second part we will review various apps for editing photos and videos. Remember that you can find and download the apps mentioned in today’s review inside the Messenger.
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