Four Most Popular Messaging Apps: You Probably Never Heard of

Most Popular Messaging Apps

Facebook rules the western countries, with the two mostly used applications both owned by the Facebook: WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Mark Zuckerberg revealed in June that the Facebook Messenger application had 700 million users. Meanwhile, WhatsApp that Facebook had purchased for $16 billion recently reported 900 million monthly active users.

The application usages ratio isn’t same in Japan, China, India and South Korea. Each country has its own messenger apps, each with amazing features.

China's WeChat

China’s WeChat messenger has more than 500 million monthly users, with around 85%of that number in country. It offers a long list of features, including smartwatch compatibility and location sharing, but most impressive feature that makes Wechat unique is called weishang.

Weishang specially introduced for microbusiness, it enable users to sell services and goods to their contacts, advertising their products or services by status update function. In July, Chinese home appliance experimented by recruiting 20,000 people to sell their products through WeChat. 

India's Nimbuzz

Nimbuzz is a most widely used messenger application in India. It offers a simple and very useful feature that's incredibly rare in the messenger marketplace.

Developed by Dutch-owned, the app let its users to communicate across different messenger apps. Other direct competitors as Viber or WhatsApp aren't compatible with this feature; Nimbuzz users can communicate their friends across different platforms like Google Plus, Facebook Messenger and Windows Live Messenger.

Japan's Line

Line was developed by NHN Japan, a property of South Korean technology company Naver. The app's development was necessitated in 2011 tsunami and Tohoku earthquake with NHN Japan's employees develop Line to communicate with employees.

The application was available for public use later that year and now just after four years; it has been installed by more than 600 million users.

The hallmark of the Line is the huge quantity of its stickers that comes with application. Line is equipped with over 10,000 emoticons, for emotive needs of users. For comparison, there are around 900 emojis available – all emotions are not usable on the same device.

South Korea's KakaoTalk

South Koreans always like to use local things. Local companies such as LG and Samsung are two of the most wonderful mobile companies in the country, and Kaokao Talk, created by Kakao Inc, it is used by 93 percent of South Koreans.

And there's another good reason too, application is one of the world's most powerful messengers. With the functionality of voice calls and standard messaging, the application is open source, allows its users to make unique and creative themes for themselves and others.