Some things to consider when choosing a chat app
1. How tech-savvy are the friends and family you want to chat with? If not very, go with a simple app like Facebook Messenger.2. Will you have regular access to Wi-Fi? While some services, like Kik, don’t require phone service and so don’t incur data charges, others will if you’re not connected to Wi-Fi. When traveling internationally it’s best to talk to your carrier about the best app for the area you’ll be traveling to.3. How important is having a host of features and filters to choose from? Some people just use their voice and facial expressions to communicate, while others feel that sounding like they’ve just huffed a carnival tent full of helium more accurately drives home their point.4. How much of a hurry are you in? Some of the apps do not alert recipients of your message until they log in.
I’ve hated talking on the phone since I was 12. That’s roughly the age at which girls start calling each other nightly to discuss their pressing problems. Here’s a sampling of what those conversations sounded like in 1973:
“Hey, it’s me. What are you doing?”
“Nothing. What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“I feel fat.”
“I shaved my legs and now they have little bumps on them.”
An hour later, I would peel the sweaty phone receiver from my ear and hang up, relieved of the burden of keeping up my half of a conversation that started nowhere and went nowhere, not knowing it would be repeated every night until we all went off to college and couldn’t afford long-distance fees.
Forty-five years later, I still hate talking on the phone. And, as it turns out, I’m not alone. According to my research, most millennials – loosely defined as those between the ages of 18 and 30 – don’t like it either. In “Why Millennials Don’t Like Making Phone Calls,” John Brandon, contributing editor to Inc.com, writes that, to millennials, ” making a call is a bit like traveling by train.” In other words, it’s outdated and it takes too long. Millennials want answers fast. They’d much rather text or tweet whatever they have to say, or even interact with a chatbot, than make a human-to-human call. (If you don’t know, a chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users.)
“They want results,” Brandon writes, “not a lengthy discussion.”
The other reason millennials avoid phone calls, according to Brandon, is because they don’t like conflict. If you answer the phone, there might be someone on the other end who is unhappy with something you did, or who wants something from you. Who among us wouldn’t rather message our displeasure or avoid a request than face the demands of a real ear in real time?
Thankfully, app developers have come up with a whole slew of messaging services designed to eliminate the burden of human interaction for millennials and non-millennials alike. (I am firmly in the baby boomer camp.)
I decided to test drive five common messaging services – FaceTime, Facebook Messenger, Kik, Snapchat and Marco Polo – to see how they work and what the differences are in terms of functionality, availability, features, privacy and security, major bonuses and pitfalls, and what demographic they are best suited for.
FaceTime
FaceTime is my husband’s preferred method of communicating in the mornings when he’s on long business trips. He can see me, I can see him, and we can turn the camera to pan the room so that I can see where he’s staying and he can see the latest not-to-be-missed position the dogs have taken up on the sofa at home. He can also see that I have not washed my hair, gotten out of my pajamas or cleaned up the house, and this, along with the fact that you can also see yourself in the corner of the screen while talking, is the downside of visibility. I firmly believe the camera function adds years to my face when in FaceTime mode, and for this reason I often cannot take my horrified eyes off myself while I’m talking, which is distracting to everyone. Thankfully, you can switch to audio in the middle of a call if need be, something you’ll want to remember when you unthinkingly answer unwashed from the sofa, or worse, from the bathroom.
Availability: Sorry, Android users, FaceTime is for iPhone users only.
Price: FaceTime comes free with the Apple iPhone. You can either download the FaceTime app, or tap your phone app, click on a contact and choose FaceTime from the top menu.
Features: These vary with the version of iPhone you have. Older versions have a few mildly interesting filters (black-and-white; color intensity), shapes you can play with, and “stickers” you can paste onto your face. You can also use filters to make yourself look painterly, or like a vintage black-and-white video. On the newer iPhone models there are even more options, like creating your own custom emoji, or superimposing a unicorn, robot or monkey head onto your own and attempting to have a reasonable conversation that way.
Privacy and security: Earlier this year, a software bug was discovered in the group-calling feature that made it possible for FaceTime callers to spy on a call’s recipients, even if the recipient did not answer the call. According to MacWorld.co/uk, that bug only affected iPhones and iPads running iOS 12.1 or later, and Macs running macOS Mojave or later. The bug was fixed in February, but iPhone users are encouraged to update their phones in order to be certain they are covered.
Bonuses and pitfalls: Ease of use is a definite bonus. Drawbacks include spottier reception for FaceTime chats than for simple audio chats. Depending on where you are calling from, or the location of the person you’re talking to, you may experience freezes, loss of connection or breaking audio and video.
Suitable for: All age groups. Theoretically, I could even teach my mother to use FaceTime. If I could first teach her to turn on her phone.
Facebook Messenger
Unbeknownst to me, I’ve been living small. I’ve been using Facebook Messenger for years, but only for, well, messaging. It turns out Messenger has a host of additional features and capabilities aside from sending texts to individuals and groups. You can also make calls to individuals or groups of people; make video calls; add filters, masks and effects; send photos; send voice messages; contact anyone with or without a Facebook account; send stickers; send GIFs; see when people are online; see when your sent message has been read; watch “stories” and add your own; play games with friends; share your location; and even send payments. After a few days of playing around with all of these features, I happily went back to living small.
According to a 2019 poll by Statista.com, Facebook Messenger was considered the second most popular texting app of all the global messaging apps, after WhatsApp, which is also owned by Facebook. However a 2018 review by Eric Ferrari-Herrmann on Androidpit.com, states that Whatsapp is ” … carelessly made, ignores your privacy on all sides and follows completely outdated standards.” This does not make me eager to use it. In addition, ads are coming to WhatsApp next year. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Availability: You do not have to have a Facebook account to use Messenger. You can, however, use Messenger in conjunction with Facebook on your computer (Messenger.com) or access it using the mobile Messenger app on Android and iOS devices. Messenger also works on the Apple Watch.
Price: It’s free to text and call with your iPhone or Android if on Wi-Fi. If you are using a 3G or 4G data connection, data charges apply.
Features: There are plenty of free stickers, and you can send GIFs. On Android, the “Chat Heads” feature allows you to see incoming messages no matter which screen you’re in on your phone. You can also share files, your location, see the timestamp for when the message was sent and when it was read, and even send money.
Privacy and security: Regular conversations on Messenger are not necessarily secure. You can, however, turn on a feature within the app called “Secret Conversations.” Secret Conversations are then stored on the sender’s and recipient’s devices, instead of on Facebook’s server.
Bonuses and pitfalls: Messenger will automatically populate your contacts, which makes things easy, but you can also add a contact or allow someone to add you as a contact by scanning a unique QR code. If you are one of the many defecting from Facebook, you don’t have to also give up Messenger. Some users complain the app takes up too much space on their device, and that it drains their battery because it’s always running in the background, waiting like a nervous lover for the next incoming communication.
Suitable for: All age groups. Even the special features, like video messaging, are straightforward and easy to figure out.
Kik
As of a few days ago, I’d never heard of Kik. But a lot of other people had. Founded in 2009 by a group of University of Waterloo (Ontario) students, Kik grew to over 300 million users in its first eight years. With Kik you can message everything from photos and videos to GIFs and emojis, but as with other apps, you can only communicate with other Kik users. To this end, as soon as you’ve created your account with your name, email address and phone number(!), Kik requests permission to scan your contacts list.
As no adult I talked to had ever heard of Kik, much less had it downloaded already, I made my husband get it so that we could experiment. He had an easier time than I did finding his way around the app, but once we figured it out, we agreed there didn’t seem to be any real advantage to Kik over any other messaging service, and the “features” (see below) were annoyingly juvenile.
Availability: It’s free to download from iTunes for iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, and from Google Play for Android phones, Windows and Blackberry.
Price: Kik is free to download and use over Wi-Fi, although there are some groups that are “pay to play.” This appears to be an attempt to keep out the under-18 set.
Features: Along with GIFs and stickers you can also access viral videos, games, memes, a very rudimentary sketchpad, and chatbots which can deliver information, carry on a conversation, give fashion tips, news and advice, and play games with you. (For the record, I beat it at Expert Tic Tac Toe and it beat me at my first attempt at Hangman with the word “overlies.” I mean who EVER picks a “v” in Hangman?) Unique user codes allow users to receive special offers at participating retail locations. I played around with the fashion and makeup chatbot features, but found them to be bulky, cumbersome and stilted. In other words, no better than my husband at dispensing advice.
Privacy and security: You can choose whether or not you want Kik to access your address book to match it with your contacts. You can also block users on Kik from contacting you. People you’ve talked to on Kik can only see your display name, username and profile picture, and unlike some other messaging apps, it uses your username rather than personal information to connect you with other users.
Like all other apps, Kik has community rules (theirs is called Kik’s List of Nopes and Yeps). The rules stress that Kik content is to be strictly PG13, and that exploitation of minors – sending nude photos or in any way promoting pornography or self-harm – is not allowed, though there is no indication of how the Kik team monitors content. The app has been implicated in a number of incidents of child exploitation in the past few years. According to Cybersafetycop.com, “Kik has been a favorite vehicle for child predators to contact children discretely and anonymously,” and the fact that Kik preserves users’ anonymity makes offenders hard to track down. Although Kik says users should have parental permission to use the app, there is no way to ensure this, and no way to prevent a user from entering a false birth date, meaning very young kids are using the service. According to Kik, one-third of American teens use the app, and 70% of its users are between 13 and 24 years old.
A quick, shallow search of groups on the app led me to “Bored People with Trucks and Guns” and another group with a confusing name that included the words “Selling Nudes” and featured a photo of very large breasts and buttocks. This should give parents (and also, perhaps, people with class) pause.
Bonuses and pitfalls: These safety concerns are a major issue. Functionality-wise, there are some plusses. The layout of the design along with the fact that Kik does not use the phone carrier’s service means that users can share longer texts and better quality videos than with some other services. Also, the fact that Kik can be used on deactivated phones that still connect to Wi-Fi is a plus. But every time you log out all the messages are cleared, so you do not receive any notifications of your Kik messages until you’ve logged into your account again.
Suitable for: Kik is targeted to teenagers, and I can’t imagine that anyone older than 16 wouldn’t have the same impulse I had, which was to throw the phone across the room 15 minutes in. Comfortably navigating all the chatbots, groups and options requires time, patience and, most of all, interest.
Snapchat
With 186 million daily users, Snapchat is one of the most downloaded apps. Its popularity hinges in part on the fact that photos and videos (called “snaps”) self-destruct after up to 10 seconds, which perhaps appeals to those who cherish living in the moment. I am not one of those people. A feature called Snapchat Story lets you share a photo or video for 24 hours. Though people have been known to save snaps for permanent reference. I played around with Snapchat with a neighbor friend who said she and her grown children use it a lot.
Availability: The app is compatible with iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch or Android, but you can also log into Snapchat without downloading the app, whether on your Android, iOS or Windows PC or laptop.
Price: The app is free to download and use over Wi-Fi.
Features: Snapchat gives you access to funny (and disturbing, face-distorting) filters for your video snaps, and offers photo editing. Some think the self-destructibility aspect encourages sexting, but according to Josh Ledgard of Kickofflabs.com, fewer than 2% of Snapchatters use it for that. Most people, he says, use it for connecting with friends and family, and businesses are beginning to use it to connect to their customers. Other people can add you by pointing their phone at the ghost on your profile and tapping their screen. If you want your friends to easily find you on Snapchat, you can share a screenshot of your Snapchat profile to Twitter or Facebook.
Privacy and security: Because Snapchat uses end-to-end encryption (meaning messages are scrambled en route, before landing in readable form only in your recipient’s inbox), they are private. That said, everyone you are friends with on Snapchat can see who you are sending your photos and videos to. A software called mSpy allows parents to see what their children are sending on Snapchat, as well as who they’re calling, texting, emailing and where they are. MSpy is also useful to business owners who want to see what employees are doing on company-owned devices. A similar software, FlexiSpy, is geared toward people who believe their spouse may be cheating – though it is illegal to secretly download spyware on someone’s phone unless they’re a minor.
Bonuses and pitfalls: The biggest plus is that because videos self-destruct, they do not eat up space on your phone. While you can activate the “replay” feature, it only lets you replay the last snap that was sent to you in the previous 24 hours. The biggest pitfall (as I see it) is that those on the receiving end can still take a screenshot, which can last forever. After sending and receiving a few videos from my neighbor, I found that not being able to access them again made me want them more than anything. If you are like me, this app will make you sad.
Best suited for: While the app was fairly easy to figure out, I felt that the effects were mostly suited to the extremely young, preteens to young teenagers, although according to Ledgard, most Snapchatters are 18 to 24 years old, followed by 25- to 34-year-olds.
Marco Polo
Billed as the “video walkie talkie,” Marco Polo is a video chat app that lets you send quick, live messages back and forth with others on the service. The app saves the videos, so you can watch and respond when it’s convenient for you.
Availability: Free for Android and iOS.
Price: If you’re connected to Wi-Fi, your data will not be used when sending and receiving Marcos (or Polos).
Features: Like Snapchat, there are a variety of silly filters (my favorite is the one that makes me look like a painting); plus, you can draw on and add text to your video. Marco Polo also has various voice filters, which are amusing the first or second time you use them. You cannot send still photos through Marco Polo, only videos.
Privacy and security: Videos and personal information are stored on Marco Polo’s servers and it’s unclear in the privacy policy for how long. To find friends, the service asks you to upload your address book, and some users have complained about Marco Polo spamming their contacts (perhaps to be expected of an app named after an explorer).
Bonuses and pitfalls: Marco Polo is pretty easy to figure out, as there are not a lot of added effects. Some people complain the app eats up a lot of data saving videos, and drains their battery.
Best suited for: Pretty much anyone who wants to go to the trouble of downloading. It’s easy to use, and using it is sort of like attending a movable feast: You get (and offer) small bites of face-time, which you can indulge in (and respond to) as you go through your day. It’s a live conversation with intermissions during which each person returns to his or her real life in progress until the next installment. Kind of like using the telephone, but with pictures.
With so many popular ways to broaden, deepen, lengthen, illustrate, embellish and animate a message, it’s hard to agree with Brandon of Inc.com that millennials avoid phone calling to save time. After trying out these apps, I will stick with ordinary text messaging, Facebook Messenger and reluctantly answering the FaceTime calls from my husband, where, because my iPhone is too old, I cannot hide behind pony heads and little butterflies landing on my nose.