![]() ![]() The Country: The United States of America For now, you can stick with Facebook, but that may change. Still, it doesn’t seem like Viber’s willing to back down: In July of this year, the company announced new hubs in Central and Eastern Europe as well as Southeast Asia. It remains the only Europe-based app in the mobile messaging big leagues, but Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are much more popular in its backyard. It’s had modest growth compared to its peers, hitting 249 million active users in April 2015, after being acquired by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten. The State of Messaging: Founded in Cyprus in 2010, Viber was launched as a direct competitor to Skype. Along with standard free voice calls and photo messaging, Nimbuzz also offers a throwback to old-school public chatrooms and has its own currency - Nimbuckz - to buy your friends virtual “gifts.” They were right: The app caught on, and now 20 percent of its 150 million registered users live in India. The State of Messaging: While Nimbuzz got its start in the Netherlands in the 2006, its developers moved the company to New Delhi in 2012 so it could take advantage of the pending smartphone boom. KakaoTalk boasts a library of bizarre stickers. Local users can use WeChat to pay for cab rides and even send virtual red envelopes to friends (or strangers) during Chinese New Year. Originally founded as Weixin in 2010, it was rebranded for the international stage as WeChat, adding features like voice and text chatting, bizarre stickers, and the “Friendshake,” which lets users add each other by shaking their phones simultaneously. Enter WeChat, the insane sticker-and-porn-gif-filled service with over 549 million monthly users in Asia alone. The State of Messaging: The Great Firewall of China, blocks any service owned by Google or Facebook, making it especially tough to stay in touch. It’s popular in Western Europe too, where it’s found a home among the Spanish, the Italians, and the Dutch. It’s particularly popular everywhere but its home country: Overall, the country with the highest WhatsApp adoption rate is South Africa, where it’s used by 78% of smartphone users. ![]() The State of Messaging: Leading the global mobile messaging pack is the California-based, Facebook-owned WhatsApp, which, according to Statista, boasts over 900 million users worldwide as of this month. Here’s a guide to help you keep track of them all. If you really want to stay in touch, you may end up downloading a different platform for each expat and far-flung friend. What does that mean for anyone attempting to stay in touch? It pays to figure out what apps you need to talk to people in different countries.Īnd, yes, the country your friends live in tends to dictate their messaging app of choice. Unfortunately for the well-traveled and cosmopolitan, no one mobile app is dominating the market internationally. Fortunately for those with friends abroad, a group of people that, demographically speaking, need to be thrifty, messenger apps are on the rise. Friends, no matter how close, aren’t worth the international fees. ![]()
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