Best instant messaging services
Messaging services can be a useful alternative to your standard SMS messaging on your smartphone. While a standard text message uses your carrier plan, a messaging app only uses WiFi and is completely independent, which means you won’t actually need a plan from a carrier to use it. These are also useful if you want to message simultaneously on your smartphone, tablet, or computer, and they often have a ton of extra features that your standard text messaging app simply won’t have.
We’ve compiled some of the best and most popular apps available to give you a few to test out.
For Android users, it’s hard to top Google’s own Hangouts app. The service is pre-installed on nearly all Android smartphones and offers some unique features that you won’t find in other apps, and it has its own video calling feature baked right in.
Hangouts is easy to use and set up because you’ll only have to know someone’s Gmail address to start chatting. Everyone with an Android phone will have a Gmail account, and there’s a good chance that users on other platforms will have one, too. While chatting, Hangouts offers full emoji support, tons of stickers, and you can even do things like share your location or video chat right from within the app. It also seamlessly handles group chats, which is a pretty big improvement over most default SMS clients.
If you don’t like having two separate apps for your messaging and SMS conversations, Hangouts will actually integrate both into its app. Your Hangouts chats will appear alongside your standard text messages so you won’t need to flip back and forth between the two, and you’ll still be able to use Hangouts features when available, like chatting on WiFi and having sent and read receipts.
Hangouts also features its own companion dialer app, too, so you can call using your carrier minutes right from within the app. This can completely replace your standard dialer app (it shows your verified Google phone number on outgoing calls) and it can integrate with Google Voice if you happen to be a user of that service.
Integrated SMS and being completely cross-platform are two of the biggest selling points for Hangouts. It should be quick and easy to start using Hangouts to chat with any of your Android buddies, and anyone on iOS can quickly download Google’s Hangouts app and go from there.
A messaging service is only useful if your friends use it too, and that’s arguably the greatest selling point for Facebook’s own Messenger app. Facebook Messenger is a standalone app for smartphones and tablets that obviously uses your Facebook account for finding friends and sending messages. The service works seamlessly across just about any device that can access Facebook, so you can start chatting on your laptop and pick up the conversation on your smartphone or tablet on the go.
Facebook Messenger offers several pretty unique features that other apps don’t match, the biggest of which are chat heads. Chat heads were introduced a few years back as Facebook’s killer feature for its messaging platform and they’re still the coolest and most unique feature to the app. The floating bubbles sit on top of every other app on your screen and allow you to quickly jump in and out of multiple conversations, making multitasking a breeze.
The app also features standard things you’d expect from messaging clients, including group messages and read receipts, plus pretty much anything else you can find in Facebook’s desktop client like being able to send your location to friends and family. Since Facebook opened up Messenger as a platform, you’ll also find some different plug-ins, tons of different stickers, the ability to securely send money, and voice/video calling.
Even if you aren’t a frequent Facebook user, the Messenger app is fully fleshed out on its own. You also probably already have a fairly large group of contacts you can chat with, since just about everyone has a Facebook today, making it an excellent option for most people.
WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging apps in the world, and although Facebook purchased the company for billions of dollars last year, it still operates independently from the social media network’s own messaging application and even offers some things that Facebook Messenger doesn’t.
The app functions pretty much like a standard instant messaging service and offers all of the normal tools and features you’d find in other apps. Group chatting with WhatsApp is quick and easy, and you can send your location, use emojis and stickers, make voice calls, and so on. Where WhatsApp excels is in its simplicity; it doesn’t use any confusing usernames or anything, and instead relies on your phone number and pulls contacts from your address book to make finding people to talk to quick and easy. It functions as close to SMS as you’ll find in an instant messaging service, but without using any of your carrier’s texting plan. This also applies to making phone calls through the WhatsApp service.
WhatsApp also natively offers a huge range of emojis that aren’t available system-wide in Android (but they are on iOS) so if you do a lot of chatting with iOS users or just like expressing yourself with tons of emojis, WhatsApp stands out. You can also change the background of your chats and do some other small customization, which might be worth investing in for some people.
The only real drawback to WhatsApp is that it’s only free for the first year. The app costs a buck per year to keep using after that, which is extremely cheap, but considering there are several other completely free alternatives, that might turn some people off from the service.
Skype is almost synonymous with video calling, having made a name for itself several years back as being one of the quickest and easiest ways to video chat with people all over the world. While almost all messaging apps offer some way to make video calls now, Skype still offers a fantastic chat system that makes it a decent alternative to text messaging.
As a messaging client, Skype offers everything you could want. It can easily replace a text messaging service, and even excels at making phone calls, not even considering its video calling capability. Skype has the ability to make calls to phone numbers around the world, even landline phones, with some extremely aggressively priced rates for talk credit. Your carrier plan is almost definitely more expensive, so if you have any friends or family in other parts of the world that you regularly talk to, Skype could almost definitely save you money.
Since Skype is owned by Microsoft, you’ll also get some discounted Skype credit if you subscribe to any of Microsoft’s Office plans that also include OneDrive space and access to Microsoft Office applications. The Skype credit alone probably isn’t worth investing in those things, but if you’re already paying for the cloud space or Office, the free credit could definitely make Skype a solid go-to messaging app.
Skype also has extremely well-designed desktop applications, as it started as a desktop program before ever making its way to mobile. The program might come preloaded on any newer Windows device you might have, but it’s freely available in the Windows store or from their website. For cross platform use that focuses primarily on desktop usage, Skype is arguably a better choice than most other apps on this list.
BlackBerry Messenger hit peak popularity when BlackBerries were still a viable smartphone choice. It really popularized instant messaging between mobile phones ahead of every other service, but like RIM’s business choices with BlackBerry phones, the service floundered in the face of newer competition.
While purchasing a BlackBerry right now still isn’t a technologically sound decision, BlackBerry Messenger has made a decent comeback in the world of messaging services and really narrows in on privacy-minded users. Plus, you’ll still have all your old BBM contacts. You know, in case you want to spark up some old conversations with your friends from a decade ago.
BBM still has all the staple messaging features from years ago, including the innovative read and delivered receipts, but it’s also added voice calling, quick ways to share content and notes, and location sharing that integrates with Glympse. You’ll still have group chats, emojis, and BBM profiles, plus push notifications and everything else that a messenger should have in 2015.
Where BlackBerry really makes their app stand out is in the privacy department. Instead of taking the simplistic approach and allowing others to find you by phone number or email address, BBM uses a pin number that you’ll have to give out before someone can reach out to you. There’s also a two-way opt-in setting for controlling who can and can’t message you, which is, again, very security focused.
The messenger offers a very unique take on disappearing messages that allows you to retract any message that you may have sent to someone, so when you delete your messages they’ll also disappear from the other person’s chat view, too. You can manually erase messages and photos, but they can also be set up to disappear after a specified time, Snapchat-style. Obviously this won’t prevent anyone from taking a screenshot of what you sent, but it’s better than every other messaging service or SMS where once it’s been sent there’s no taking it back.
The biggest drawback to BBM now is its dwindled user base. While some people are still on the service, without coming pre-installed on any new smartphones it’s hard to keep tons and tons of people using the app regularly. For casual chatting with friends and family, it might be a tough sell to get them to jump on board with a security-focused messaging app that requires pin numbers instead of usernames, but it does make an excellent choice for someone looking for a service that can handle communication in a work or business environment.
These are five of the best messaging services available on Android that cover most use cases, but there are plenty of others in the Play Store, too. Are there any that you and your friends used that we passed over? Let us know in the comments.
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