Smartphone Messaging In Asia: Who’s Winning?

Person-to-person communication on a mobile phone has always been the most basic of all mobile phone features, but the proliferation of fast and abundant internet access has fostered a well-funded competition to be the go-to mobile messaging platform. Like almost everything in technology, there are two distinct approaches to the goal of ultimate messaging domination: grow fast or monetize. While Western Hemisphere companies like Facebook and Google are utilizing accelerated growth strategies, Asian competitors seem to have figured out how to monetize and yet still grow fast. Here is a breakdown how these two strategies actually play out in the messaging world.

Facebook and Google

From the viewpoint of a smartphone user in the United States it might seem like for the most part mobile messaging is dominated by Facebook with both its Messenger app and Whatsapp and Google with Hangouts and its recently launched app, Allo.

To put numbers behind this assertion, Facebook and Whatsapp each have a billion monthly active users, and while Google doesn’t share its user numbers specifically for Hangouts, it did reveal that Gmail has a billion MAU’S. (Hangouts is a part of Gmail) For the sake of comparison, Skype arguably one of the first peer to peer desktop and now mobile communication tools only has 300 million users.

Read the rest on the YCombinator blog here: https://blog.ycombinator.com/smartphone-messaging-outside-the-us-whos-winning/