I had this drafted for a Path post but what the hell, I’ll put it here instead. Probably going for a longer post some other time.

Messaging apps are a dime a dozen and there’s zero financial cost of switching or adopting one app over the other although it’s always about who’s on which service. My latest post on DailySocial about the subject addresses this fact. It’s so easy to sign up to and use each one, it’s no big deal to have multiple messaging apps installed although some people may prefer to stick to one or no more than two or three to keep things simple.

Me, I try almost any of the major apps and each app has different groups of people using it. For most work contacts I use email while Facebook Messenger, Path message, and Twitter DM are used interchangeably depending which one is the easiest to use to contact the other person. iMessage and FaceTime are for people who also use iOS. I also use Couple with my girlfriend, it’s a fun little app just for two.

Funny thing is the supposedly more popular apps like Line, KakaoTalk, and WhatsApp don’t see that much use from me but they do get used regularly with certain people who are on those services. I also use Telegram with a limited set of contacts. Kakao is getting more interesting though. I’m thinking of exploring it for group chats and coordinating things with people. Apparently it even has a voting feature which is really neat and surprising. Considering it for communications for future projects.

For internal comms at work, we use Slack. It’s really easy to use and practical, but perhaps due to the tech it uses to connect, it has connectivity delays that forces me to wait for up to a minute before I can send a message or sometimes it even freezes, forcing me to kill and relaunch the app.

So yeah, that’s the list of messaging apps I use. It changes over time depending on priorities and practicality obviously. For example, I used to use Google Hangouts until last year but not anymore. The app on iOS is unstable and just terrible to use. I’m also weaning off Skype, that horrible, horrible app that’s completely unreliable.