Saturday, March 30, 2024

Getting the message

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If you have a smartphone and use it to send a lot of texts, you should be thinking about alternatives to smart messaging services (SMS). A traditional text-SMS runs over the cellular network. There is a cost to sending the text – dependent on the plan you have with your carrier – and there is a limit of 160 characters. Also, if the cellular network goes down or is congested your message might not send. This is where messaging apps can be worthwhile. They run over the internet, meaning you don’t have to pay your provider to send them – as long as you are within your data limit or are on wi-fi – and they will still work when there’s congestion on the cellular network. There’s also no character limit – you can write messages of any length you like.
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There are other benefits, too – many messaging apps will let you know when someone has read your message and indicate if the person is replying.

Often you can start a conversation on one device, such as a smartphone, and continue on another – for example, a tablet.

When you are travelling they are useful because you can use a wi-fi connection and not be charged for the text. They often also have stickers – cartoon pictures – you can send to people and options to send audio and video as well.

There are a huge number of apps available. One of the best-known messaging apps worldwide is WhatsApp, which has 900 million active users.

Like Viber, another popular app with 250m active users, the main benefit is that it can be used across platforms such as iOS (Apple), Android and Blackberry devices.

That means if you have an iPhone and a friend has a Samsung Galaxy, you can message each other as long as you both have the app. WhatsApp was bought by Facebook in 2014.

WeChat has 650m active users and LINE has 200m active users. They are most popular in China and Japan respectively.

Social media messaging apps

Social media companies have well and truly climbed aboard the messaging bandwagon. All are cross-platform capable but require a user to have an account with them, as well as the person receiving the message.

  • Facebook Messenger has about 700m active users and the app or messaging function can be used on Facebook in your browser. You can also start a conversation on one device and pick-up on another.
  • Google has its Hangouts app, which came from its Google+ social network. It does not release user figures so it is hard to know how many active users it has.
  • Twitter also has its direct message service as part of its offering and there are 300m active Twitter users.
  • LinkedIn, which has about 100m active users, also has a messaging service.

Specific platform apps

Then there are apps that only run on one platform.

  • iMessage comes with Apple devices only. However, it does allow you to send a text from iMessage to anyone with a non-Apple phone – it’s just that it sends as a regular text message so it uses the cellular network and your carrier will charge you for it as a text message.
  • Android also has Android-only offerings including ChompSMS and Textra.

Other messaging options

Skype and Snapchat also can be used for messaging – these companies have 300m and 100m active users respectively.

Just remember that with Snapchat your message disappears soon after it’s opened so it’s not the option if you want to be able to refer back to your messages.

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