Instant messaging services have been around for a while, but only in the past couple of years, in their cross-platform, mobile avatars have they truly picked up steam as one of the primary modes of text messaging, almost completely replacing SMSes, at least amongst ‘contacts’.
These IM services can be device agnostic, but limited to a platform, like BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), or, platform-agnostic and available for all major smartphone operating systems, like WhatsApp.
The new Facebook Messenger for Android falls into the device agnostic category, working only for Android, and allowing users to send messages to any of their Facebook contacts, as long as they have phone numbers to go alongside, and also use Facebook, or the FB Messenger for Android service. Support for other operating systems, as well as wider compatibility with legacy OS versions, is supposed to roll out in the coming weeks.
With all this news about Facebook’s rumoured WhatsApp acquisition finally resolving into the social networking giant unveiling its own standalone instant messaging service, the market could quite understandably be quite shaken up, and to gauge the interest in the market for a new untried service from a major player competing against a tried and tested mobile IM client, we thought we’d ask our Facebook fans, readers and subscribers just what they felt about the state of the smartphone-based instant messaging art.
We received a total of 584 responses, of which an overwhelming majority (303 votes, or 52% of the respondents) answered that they’d stick to WhatsApp. 82 votes, or 14% of the respondents, were in favour of shifting from WhatsApp to FB Messenger for Android. 55 votes, or 9% of the respondents, said they’d wait for FB Messenger to support more platforms before switching. The remaining 144 respondents, or 25% of the poll takers, said they don’t use instant messaging services of this kind.
Check out the poll results in graphical form below.
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