Slack, Signal, Hangouts, Wire, iMessage, Telegram, Facebook Messenger… Why do we need so many apps to do the same task?
Decades ago, sci-fi writers imagined flying machines, automatically cooking kitchen meals, and the ability to call anyone on the planet. But what they didn't know was that we'd end up in messaging hell with an endless supply of apps designed to simply send a text to a friend.
Sending a text has become a mental gymnastics: this friend does not use iMessage, but will reply if I send a WhatsApp message. Another has WhatsApp, but he does not answer there, you will have to use Telegram. Others can be found through Signal, SMS, and Facebook Messenger.
How did we get into this mess of messengers, if everything was so simple before? Why do we need a whole catalog of messaging apps just for connecting with friends?
SMS: the first application for communication
In 2005, I was a teenager in New Zealand, we had "stupid" phones gaining popularity, and there was only one way to send messages to the phone: SMS.
Carriers in the country offered a $10 rate for unlimited messages, but soon capped them at 10 after discovering that teens would send as many messages as they were allowed to. We counted our balance of messages, sent thousands of messages a day, and tried not to use them all. When you reached zero, you were cut off from the world, or had to pay $000 per message until the beginning of the next month. And everyone has always exhausted this limitation by accumulating bills for sending tiny snippets of text.
Everything was easier back then. If I had a person's phone, I could send him a message. I did not have to check many applications and switch between services. All messages lived in one place, and everything was fine. If I was at a computer, I could use MSN Messenger or AIM [let's not undeservedly forget about ICQ / approx. transl.], but only occasionally, and everything always returned to SMS when I was AFK [not at the keyboard / approx. transl.].
And then the internet took over phones and a new breed of messaging apps emerged: always online, on the phone, with photos, links, and other kinds of content. And I no longer had to pay the operator $0,2 per message if I was online.
Startups and tech giants began to fight for a new online world, and as a result, hundreds of messaging apps appeared in the following years. iMessage became popular with iPhone users in the US, in part because it could fall back to SMS. WhatsApp, then independent, conquered Europe because it focused on privacy. China intervened and spread WeChat, where users were eventually able to do everything from buying music to finding a taxi.
Surprisingly, the names of almost all of these new messengers will be familiar to you: Viber, Signal, Telegram, Messenger, Kik, QQ, Snapchat, Skype, and so on. Even more amazing is that you have several of these apps on your phone - definitely not just one of them. There is no longer just one messenger.
In Europe, this annoys me daily: I use WhatsApp to chat with friends from the Netherlands, Telegram for those who switched to it, Messenger with family from New Zealand, Signal with people who are into technology, Discord with friends from games, iMessage with parents and private messages on Twitter with online acquaintances.
Thousands of reasons led us to this situation, but messengers have become a kind of zoo: no one is friends with each other, and messages cannot be sent between messengers, because each of them uses patented technology. Old messaging apps cared about interoperability - for example, so that users can send messages to other people using the same protocol.
Nothing can induce Apple to open up the iMessage protocol to other apps—or even Android users—because then it would be too easy for users to leave the iPhone. Messengers have become symbols of closed software, the perfect tool for managing users: they are hard to give up when all your friends use them.
The short message service, SMS, for all its shortcomings, was an open platform. Like email today, SMS worked everywhere, regardless of device or provider. ISPs may have killed this service by charging a disproportionate price, but I miss SMS because it "just worked" and was the only, reliable way to send a message to anyone.
There is still a little hope
If Facebook succeeds, that could change: In January, The New York Times reported that the company was working on merging Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp into a single backend so that users could chat with each other without switching. At first glance, this looks attractive, but it's not what I need: Instagram is good because it is separate, like WhatsApp, and combining them will allow Facebook to get a holistic view of my habits.
Also, such a system will be a big goal: if all messengers gather in one place, then it will be enough for attackers to hack one of them to find out everything about you. Some security-conscious users switch between different apps on purpose, believing that their conversations are harder to track if they are split into multiple channels.
There are other projects to revive open messaging systems. Protocol (RCS) continues the legacy of SMS, and has recently gained support from carriers and device manufacturers around the world. RCS brings all your favorite features of iMessage to an open platform - communicator's message set indicators, images, online statuses - so any manufacturer and operator can implement it.
Although Google is actively promoting this standard and integrating it into Android, RCS is slowly gaining momentum and is experiencing problems that are delaying its widespread adoption. For example, Apple refused to add it to the iPhone. The standard has received support from major players such as Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Huawei, HTC, ASUS and so on, but Apple has remained silent - perhaps fearing the loss of iMessage appeal. RCS also depends on the support of its operators, however, they are slowing down, since it will require significant investments in infrastructure.
But the uncomfortable reality is that this mess is unlikely to be fixed in the near future. Unlike much of the tech sector, where near-monopoly players have taken control – like Google in search and Facebook in social media – messaging has yet to be taken over. Historically, it has been very difficult to seize a monopoly on messaging, as the area is highly fragmented and switching between services is very frustrating. However, Facebook, controlling so many large messengers, is clearly trying to capture this space so that users do not leave it anywhere at all.
So far, there is at least one solution that makes life a little easier: applications like и place all messengers in one window so that it is faster to switch between them.
But in the end, everything remains the same on the phone: we have a whole catalog of instant messengers, and there is no way to simplify everything to one. Having more choices in this area is good for competition, but every time I look at my phone, I have to do a mental calculation that I have been doing for almost a decade: which app should I choose to send a message to a friend?
Source: habr.com