If you were trying to protect your privacy on Facebook by limiting your conversations to Whatsapp; it’s time to start thinking of alternatives after Facebook has bought it
As WhatsApp is based on phone numbers rather than usernames, Facebook has in effect just bought a list of hundreds of millions of phone numbers.
“Currently, WhatsApp can change terms and conditions at any time, without notifying users, which many people who use this service aren’t aware of. Meanwhile, Facebook already has a very broad copyright license on people’s content and already shares your data with many other services,” explains St John Deakins, chief executive of online identity service Citizenme.
“Now with Facebook buying WhatsApp, this could see more and more private information becoming part of Facebook’s database. From a personal data standpoint, this is extremely worrying.”
But while WhatsApp is huge in certain parts of our world, and definitely in the Arab World, there are some decent alternatives in the text-messaging market that might not be the best solution for your security concerns but using any of them gives you a chance at not putting all your data eggs in one messaging basket so to speak.
Line
Easily considered to be WhatsApp’s biggest competitor. People are already using it even before Facebook bought it. Why is it popular:
This messaging app lets users send text messages, images, video and audio as well as make phone calls over the internet or video conference.
The Line messaging app is available for almost every computer and mobile platform, including Windows, OS X, the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Nokia’s Asha and even Firefox OS.
Line has 350 million users globally, expanding rapidly from 10 million in December 2011 according to data from Statista.
Kik Messenger
Kik is very popular in the gulf region, why:
Kik Messenger sends texts, images and voice messages over a smartphone’s data connection avoiding mobile operator messaging charges. It also integrates a web browser into the application allowing users to browse content and share it directly with their friends.
Kik is available on the iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, Nokia’s Ovi store and BlackBerry. Now with 100m users globally, Kik was released in 2010 and quickly hit 1 million users in just 14 days.
BBM
BlackBerry’s Messenger is the grandfather of the phone instant messaging apps. Originally only available as an integral part of BlackBerry’s smartphones, allowing secure instant messages to be sent between BlackBerry users. After being bought by Apply; BBM was released for both Android and the iPhone in September 2013 making it cross platform for the first time.
Why is it so popular?
Many started their text messaging life early on with BBM. BBM for iPhone and Android was downloaded 10m times in the first day, with over 80 million users globally across all platforms by October 2013. BlackBerry announced that by December 2013 BBM had 40 million users of its iPhone and Android apps.
Skype
Skype maybe known for voice and video calling, but it also integrates a solid instant messaging function.
Why would you use it?
It’s great for business conversations, conference calls and virtual meet-ups.
Available for Android, the iPhone, Windows Phone and BlackBerry, as well as desktops, home phones TVs and games consoles, Skype allows you to send text messages, images, videos, voice messages and send group messages.
Tango
Many users in the Middle East use Tango for voice and video calls only but it’s actually a lot more than that, Tango is moving towards a full-fledged social network. In addition to standard text services, it offers video and voice calls, photo-sharing, in-app games, friend discovery and Spotify-powered music messaging.
Tango is available for iOS,Android and Windows Phone 7. A desktop version is also available.
There are other messaging apps out there if you’re in explore mode, including WeChat – huge in China but yet to break big in the UK – Tango and TextFree, as well as Apple’s iMessage, which is baked into the iPhone and iPad, but is also available on Apple’s computers.
Do you use an app that we haven’t mentioned? Please let us know about it.
