WhatsApp, Telegram, Allo - Gain For Users

They have long enough been the incumbents of the mobile Internet industry: message services like WhatsApp or the Facebook Messenger. Billions of bytes of text, photos, videos are shared every day between friends, colleagues or just acquaintances. The big players of the messenger services represent nowadays more active users than the social networks like Facebook or Instagram. The news that WhatsApp added end-to-end encryption to every form of communication on its service is not petite. Though might went poorly noticed under the headlines about Apple vs FBI battle, this step reconfirms the current tendency of many companies to offer the data security as a competitive advantage. But is it the one?

In 2014, Facebook acquired the company for ludicrous $19billion, which at that point of time raised questions in the market. I am keen to see if two following questions can be answered. First, what it is behind this move? Why wasn’t the encryption rolled out first for the Facebook Messenger? WhatsApp rival Telegram owned by Sergey Durov has from the very beginning established its position as The securest messenger in the world. After the rumoured acquisition discussions with Telegram Google presented yesterday its own messenger for IOs and Android – Allo, which uses the same encryption technology as WhatsApp.

Secondly, the question how to monetize is becoming a hot-button. Messaging apps are the portals of mobile, and Facebook and Google own the biggest ones. However, in-house development costs don’t put so much pressure as a $19billion shopping. Facebook usually focuses its efforts on marketing, user analytics, and advertisement, and these tactics won't work with WhatsApp as a private, ad-free space. To monetize WhatsApp through ads would ruin its core competencies. For the advertisement revenues understanding what users ‘talk’ about is crucial, hence contradicting the model of a secure service. Therefore, WhatsApp will be developing in the direction of chatbots, following what Facebook Messenger has recently introduced. A messenger which will manage to integrate the chatbots in the best technical and user-experience way will have a chance to earn the most. Sergey Durov from Telegram in his interview also agreed that third-party platforms are essential for monetizing the service.

What else? Moving into the B2B segment is another viable option, developing quick messaging solutions for the internal and external communications entering the arena of Slack, Hipchat, Microsoft Lync and others. Apps are rapidly gaining popularity among employees as a communication tool, but the challenge is to make the corporate apps not only secure but appealing as the employee’s chosen apps. Installing one extra company app might be frustrating for an employee, perceived as transient and, therefore, used less willingly. Hence, having all-in-one the private and work chats in one app is more efficient, easy and encouraging to use. And the first step was already done by WhatsApp by introducing the desktop version of the service.

In the end, we users will benefit the most out of this interesting and muscular competition among the three players getting new features and services added to the daily messaging routine.