Mobile

For Free Texting Apps, the Market Is Far From Conquered

By Brian X. Chen
At the Mobile World Congress, an annual trade show held in Barcelona last month, the writer noticed that many people kept in touch not with WhatsApp, but with rival messaging services from their countries of origin. Barry Huang/Reuters

In late February, while I was in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress, the mobile phone trade show, I had a bit of a communication problem. To avoid racking up a hefty cellphone bill, I tried to keep in touch with the people I met using WhatsApp, the prominent free text messaging service that Facebook recently bought. But to my surprise, most people I met were using their country’s own flavor of texting app.

The conversations throughout the conference would generally go something like this: After a meeting, I would say: “Let’s keep in touch. Are you on WhatsApp?”

For most people, the response was “no.” An executive of Huawei, the Chinese company, said he and his colleagues used WeChat, a popular free texting service in China. An employee of LG, the South Korean manufacturer, preferred another service, Kakao Talk.

Even on my flight to Spain, a German tech worker sitting next to me told me about Telegram, a relatively new texting service popular among Germans.

WhatsApp was well known to virtually everyone because of the recent headlines, but not everyone was using it. Instead, people preferred other services because the rest of their friends were using them — what is called a network effect.

The experience made it clear that WhatsApp, even with more than 450 million users, by no means has certain domination of the free texting market — and you would think it might if Facebook paid up to $19 billion to acquire the start-up. It also gave insight into why a young, sprawling company that was so determined to stay independent would cave in and sell, other than the obvious fact that $19 billion is a whole lot of money.

Other texting services may get even stronger now that Facebook has bought WhatsApp. App Annie, a research firm that studies the mobile app market, said that after the Facebook deal, it noticed a surge in downloads for three WhatsApp competitors: Telegram, Threema and myEnigma Secure Messaging. Each service offers strong security features like full encryption, and a significant amount of their downloads are coming from Germany, which has been in privacy litigation with Facebook, said Bertrand Schmitt, chief executive of App Annie.

“This suggests that the gains may be driven by privacy concerns related to the Facebook acquisition,” Mr. Schmitt said.

Last week I returned from Spain to California with not just a stack of business cards to add to my Rolodex, but also an entire folder of apps on my iPhone just for texting people around the world.