There’s this app called Wire, which I love. It’s the most beautiful messaging app I’ve ever tried: super-clean backgrounds, a heavy emphasis on user photos and clean design, and a great mix of calling, texting, and weirdly great GIF search. It works across all the platforms I use, and it works well. It’s my ideal communication tool.
But I never use it. None of my friends do, and so the app icon on my iPhone’s screen is more like a beautiful, empty work of art. (Working title: The Way Things Ought to Be.) Instead, I bounce through a folder full of messaging apps. I talk to a few people on Hangouts, a few others on Facebook Messenger, exactly one person on WhatsApp. I Snapchat all those people, too. I use Twitter DMs, GroupMe, HipChat, Skype, even Instagram Direct a couple of times. Livetext, Yahoo’s new app, is fun; I’ve been using that. Oh, and there’s email. And iMessage. And, of course, good ol’ green-bubble text messaging.
Frankly, it’s a horrible system—and it’s past time to change it. It’s not just that it’s annoying to have 20 different conversations across 20 different apps. (Which it is.) It’s not that I mind remembering where I was already talking to someone or guessing which app they’re most likely to check quickly. (Which I do.) It’s that, by not picking a place to congregate, we’re missing out on one of the most powerfully useful new things in tech: the all-encompassing messaging app.
The WeChat Way
The phenomenon that is WeChat, the messaging app from Chinese company Tencent, is by now well-documented. For more than 500 million users in China, it’s essentially The Everything App. People use it to talk with their friends and their colleagues, and also to strangers both nearby and across the world. They use it to book train tickets and get their laundry done, order dinner and play the lottery, pick out clothes and play videogames. It’s the remote control for your smart home, a mobile bank, and a way to renew your visa. There are popular WeChatters, who use it like a blog or Instagram account. You can, for all intents and purposes, live your entire life within WeChat. It takes a phone full of apps to replicate its entire functionality. It’s simple enough that anyone can use it, versatile enough that everyone has some use for it.
WeChat proves an important point: conversational, simple messaging is a powerful interface. We can talk to our gadgets the way we talk to our friends, and accomplish almost anything. In just the last few months we’ve seen an explosion of messaging-based apps, which let you do with a simple text far more than could have been imagined by whichever money-grubbing carrier vice president dreamed up texting in the first place. Apps like Lark chat with us about how we slept and whether we’re getting enough exercise, and services like Magic find us anything we can dream of—even a tiger. Slack has turned basically every feature of your business, from tracking projects to file sharing to bonus announcements, into messaging.
Yet each new thing requires setting up a new account, entering your payment credentials, trusting some new company with your info, and—most importantly—remembering to use them. And way too many of them rely on old-school SMS text messaging.
Which… well, let’s talk about SMS for a second. For most people, at least in the U.S., standard text messages are the default mode of communication. Your phone number is what you give out to love interests and potential employers; it’s the most universal identifier you have. That’s probably not going to change, and it doesn’t really need to. But SMS, as a technology, is terrible. It was made two decades ago as a bandwidth rounding error, a way to charge people to send data that the carriers could sneak through for free. It was pure profit. It’s also never really changed: You can still only send 160 characters, group texting is a mess, and sending pictures is awkward and unpredictable. Messaging is bigger than texting, and SMS can’t keep up.
A great messaging app could be to the Web browser what the browser was to the Internet before it. It’s the organizing principle, the window through which we access everything we use and do. Except this time, instead of dealing with pop-up ads, multiple logins, and the insane new interface du jour, we’d have a single way to interact with people, brands, services, and random celebrities. Just text, or tap on the mic and say something.
Success on WeChat’s level does create some complications. WeChat’s gravitational pull is so significant that an entire industry of companies exist solely as so-called “official accounts.” These companies have, frankly, no power—WeChat runs the system. It hardly encourages a meritocracy, or free competition. There is similar worry about Facebook, that Messenger could become to the U.S. what WeChat is to China. These questions matter, and they don’t have easy answers. But they’re worth getting right, because this is what’s coming next: technology that works on our terms, exists where we’re looking for it, and doesn’t force us to remember its particular quirks and shortcuts. Technology that begins with connections, and branches out from there.
The Clubhouse Contenders
Many apps will try to replicate what WeChat has done, and all (or all but one) will fail. Many of the so-called contenders aren’t messaging apps at heart, but have tried to tack messaging onto their existing capabilities. Other apps are stubbornly single-platform (lookin’ at you, iMessage), and thus won’t work either. WhatsApp, the world’s most popular messaging app, which could otherwise be a clear contender, has thus far refused to become a true platform. A lot of companies, including WeChat itself, along with Line, Kik, and Kakao Talk, are tremendously popular in other countries. But none have made real inroads in the U.S.
Right now, there are only two companies with a real shot stateside: Facebook Messenger, and Snapchat. Both are neatly following the WeChat formula. They accumulated a huge amount of users, albeit in different ways: Snapchat started as a way to talk with friends without worrying about things being saved, while Messenger leveraged the huge networks we’ve built of friends, exes, and people we met one time in college. Then, they started to build out.
Snapchat created Stories (send your snaps to everyone!) and Discover (brand snaps!) to give itself a little more public visibility. It also added Snapcash, creating the financial underpinning it’ll need to make money from everything else. Meanwhile, Messenger was consciously uncoupling from Facebook, so even if you somehow avoided having an account, you can still use Messenger. It began to facilitate payments, and made the most concrete play yet to roll out an app store for a messaging app. It’s mostly full of awkward ways to send GIFs, but it’s infrastructure. Infrastructure matters. For good measure, Messenger also rolled out a Web app, so you don’t necessarily need your phone to use it. And if rumors are to be believed, Facebook has a service called Moneypenny in the works that’s going to act as a personalized virtual assistant, helping Messenger’s 700 million users get things done. Moneypenny will run in Messenger, and it’ll be entirely powered by messaging.
There’s no better way to create a sticky app than to give people access to those they care about—texting and email are so resilient, despite being technologically backward, because they’re where our friends are. It’ll take a big push in a single direction to overcome that, but it’ll be worth the effort to have a single platform, big enough that everyone is on it.
It’s time for you, me, and all our friends to just pick a messaging app. It doesn’t have to be the only one you use, but it needs to be the one we all use. It’s the new default answer, the place I know I can reach you, whether you’re my friend, my colleague, or my dry-cleaning guy. We never really replaced or improved the phone call—we just split it into a dozen different apps and services. But it’s time to bring everything back together.
Pundits have argued forever that there will never be the one true messaging app in the U.S., because the network effects are too hard to engineer. Well let’s engineer them—right now. It doesn’t so much matter what we pick (though Facebook Messenger is probably the best bet right now). Maybe it’s Hangouts, or Kik, or hell, maybe it’s WeChat. What’s far more important is the fact that we all finally choose. So just let me know which it is, and I’ll make sure I don’t uninstall it.