What’s up?

Messaging apps are massive. WhatsApp has more than 600 million active users while stablemate Facebook Messenger has more than 500 million. Chinese rival WeChat - known as Weixin in the mainland - has 400 million. And those are just the 900-pound gorillas of the messaging world. Snapchat, Viber, KakaoTalk, Line, Kik, QQ, Tango and others have eight- or nine-figure active user totals, while Apple's iMessage serves iOS users. Meanwhile, newcomers such as current United States college buzz Yik Yak and recent novelty app Yo are popping up all the time, with fresh spins on messaging. So how will these apps evolve? Beyond adding features such as voice calls and video chat, four main paths are emerging, although they are by no means mutually exclusive: privacy, payments, media partnerships and advertising. Messaging apps share some simple goals: they want to attract more users, retain the ones they have already and find ways to make money that don't conflict with the first two aims. Here's a snapshot of how they're approaching this. Privacy and encryption Until now, there have been two distinct classes of messaging apps: the big, mainstream ones, and the group focusing specifically on encryption and privacy, including TextSecure, Telegram, Hemlis, Threema, Wickr and others. That may be changing, with WhatsApp's recent addition of end-to-end encryption to its Android app, with iOS to follow. It's working with the company behind TextSecure, Open Whisper Systems, which described the partnership as "the largest deployment of end-to-end encrypted communication in history". The aim with this technology is to reassure users that even if the provider of their messaging app wanted to share their messages with intelligence agencies, they wouldn't be able to. That's a point Apple has made about its iMessages system, too. "If the government laid a subpoena to get iMessages, we can't provide it. It's encrypted and we don't have a key," said chief executive Tim Cook in a September interview. However, researchers have challenged the company's claims. This is the other important trend around privacy and messaging apps: not just that the big ones are paying more attention to it, but that they'll be facing scrutiny to check if their claims are true. That's already happened in the case of Viber, which bills security as a key feature of its app. In April, researchers suggested it was transmitting images and video without encryption, and storing them online afterwards. The company moved quickly to fix the vulnerability. Even the WhatsApp announcement, which came with a respected partner, sparked questions about how the metadata from messages - who contacted whom and where - might be dealt with by Facebook. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit defender of civil liberties, is already active in this debate, and its Secure Messaging Scorecard rates the main apps on their vulnerability to internet surveillance. Payments and shopping Chatting to friends and swapping photos and videos are the core of messaging apps, but payment - whether to those friends or to companies selling products and services - is one of the new frontiers. Snapchat got in early recently, when it launched Snapcash, a partnership with payments firm Square that will enable people to register their debit cards with the latter company, then send cash to their friends' bank accounts within the app. It's limited to users over 18 in the US for now, with Snapchat's historical association with racy selfies sparking predictable "pay-for-porn" comments about Snapcash's likely use. But the new feature could also be a key part of Snapchat's work with brands and advertising. Facebook is also going to make payments a key part of Facebook Messenger sooner rather than later. The social network hired former PayPal president David Marcus in June to become head of its messaging products. "I'm looking forward to getting my hands dirty again attempting to build something new and meaningful at scale," he wrote at the time. Last month, leaked screenshots suggested this new and meaningful thing would be the ability to register credit and debit cards with Facebook, then send money to friends through Messenger. In China, messaging and payments coming together is older news. Last year, WeChat added online payment functions to the app in Hong Kong and the mainland, so users could buy products from e-commerce sites that had profiles on the service. It has also been helping people send money to one another, with millions swapping "red envelopes" to celebrate the Lunar New Year. Meanwhile, in Japan, Line created Line Mall, a standalone app that's more of an eBay-style service, connecting sellers and buyers. Expect a flurry of partnerships between messaging and payment companies in the coming months - US app Dasher recently struck a deal with wallet app Venmo along these lines - and perhaps some experiments with integrating bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies into messaging apps, too. Media partnerships For young people, in particular, messaging apps are becoming their main social networks: even if they still have Facebook profiles, it's WhatsApp and WeChat where they're spending their time. This in turn is fuelling efforts to investigate whether those people will also want to get their media through these apps. In Asia, mobile gaming and messaging already go hand-in-hand, with the games networks of Line and South Korea's KakaoTalk, in particular, proving lucrative for those companies and their developer partners. In the West, Snapchat's media ambitions are particularly interesting. The company has been working on a new section of its app that will deliver "disappearing videos, news articles and advertisements", according to a Wall Street Journal scoop in August. "The product would let users read daily editions of publications as well as watch video clips of TV shows or movies by holding down a finger on the screen, like they do with photos and other messages on the app before disappearing," claimed the report. It was followed up by a Digiday report earlier this month showing leaked mock-up images of Snapchat's new feature, complete with content from media partners from Vice, BuzzFeed and ESPN to Spotify, Cosmopolitan magazine and the Daily Mail. The sidebar of shame could soon be a messaging thread of shame. BuzzFeed is at the centre of this trend: it has already announced a partnership with WeChat to launch an official account sending people "the most viral things on the web that day", having recruited a staffer to specifically focus on integrations with messaging apps earlier in the year. "There are so many people using messaging apps - our theory is that large numbers of people will use them to communicate and share media in the future," BuzzFeed told news website TechCrunch. "To get involved early and figure out how users share these things is really important for the future of BuzzFeed." That's the driver for all these companies: experimenting. Witness Spotify working with Tango, first on helping people share music clips with friends within the latter's app, then on a standalone musical photo-sharing app called Tango Music Pix. Individual public figures are also experimenting. Ex-Beatle Paul McCartney has more followers on Line than on Twitter while Viber is trying to sign celebrities up to a new feature called Public Chats and Kik has been used by the likes of boy band One Direction to communicate with fans. Advertising Then there's advertising, which is underpinning the messaging apps' moves into payments/commerce and media alike. Snapchat introduced ads last month, with a blog post eager to reassure users they wouldn't be intrusive. "An advertisement will appear in your Recent Updates from time to time, and you can choose if you want to watch it. No biggie. It goes away after you view it or within 24 hours," explained the company. "We won't put advertisements in your personal communication - things like Snaps or Chats. That would be totally rude. We want to see if we can deliver an experience that's fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted." Rival Kik, though, is exploring whether it is possible to put advertising into people's chats non-intrusively, with a feature called "promoted chats", which launched recently. Users who opt in may see sponsored messages pop up when they mention certain "trigger words" for the brands they follow. Some messaging apps remain resolutely anti-ads. "We do not believe in plastering our users with advertisements," Viber's boss Talmon Marco said last year, albeit with a quote that leaves the way open to un-plastered ads in the future. Meanwhile, WhatsApp chief executive Jan Koum wrote a blog post titled "Why we don't sell ads" in 2012, which set out his views in no uncertain terms: advertising is a distraction for engineers, and causes "the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought". For now, that policy seems to be holding true, even under Facebook's ownership. But one of the key trends around messaging in general over the next few years will be how WhatsApp's rivals approach the sensitive area of brands and advertising without sending their users fleeing. Guardian News & Media

What’s up?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The nature of messaging apps is evolving, with WhatsApp, WeChat and myriad other providers placing big bets on the next great service, writes Stuart Dredge

The nature of messaging apps is evolving, with WhatsApp, WeChat and myriad other providers placing big bets on the next great service, writes Stuart Dredge