First let’s discuss the reason for texting’s incredible popularity! One of the greatest reasons is probably that you are able to talk to, or contact a person immaterial of their or your location, time of day, at work in a meeting, walking down the street, your doctor or specialist while in surgery, areas with poor cell phone coverage. Teens are the main drive behind the surge in texting, with 13 to 17-year-olds averaging around 1750 texts per month while conversing by phone approximately 230 times a month. Tweens i.e. kids under age 12 averages 430 text a month
According to an Ofcom market report, adults in Britain average at around 200 texts monthly, in excess of double the figure from four years ago, 58% of British adults make use of text messaging a minimum of once a day, mostly for communication with friends and family. In the US, American Airlines are now texting their passengers to inform them of flight delays, and the NYPD also prefers to use texting in order to check license plates, instead of the relatively bulky computers available to them while on the road. Any single platform texting app would, due to its social nature, be close to useless if it was confined to only one type of operating system. Due to each person’s individual tastes and specific requirements that might be best met outside of the two major platform suppliers – Android & iOS. These reasons are the main drive why we considered only cross-platform apps, because our associates, friends, and family quite often prefers a different platform!
WhatsApp, available on iOS, Android, and WP8, the app has always been remarkably easy to set up and automatically syncs with the user’s contact list to offer an ad free, feature rich experience. Featuring abilities to handle texting, photo sharing and in app camera, VoIP, voice messages, as well as short video messages, to provide a full rich experience, which made it the most subscribed app worldwide!
Blackberry Messenger lately available to iOS, Android, arrived on the two major platforms after a protracted struggle by BlackBerry to keep their proprietary app contained to its own ecosystem. The company finally relented, releasing into iOS and Android during 2013, to offer a robust IM app offering free texting, VoIP, photo & file & and location sharing, with its PIN system protecting subscribers email and telephone numbers.
Facebook Messenger available for iOS and Android is a dedicated IM app, building on its existing Facebook chat network while adding mobile texting features. The user’s Facebook account signs them in to offer texting, voice messaging, and voice calls.
Skype a highly trusted standby, already long available to WP8, Android, and iOS users, it first became famous for its voice and video call conferencing capabilities. The app now boasts a fairly decent IM that presents users with texting, photo sharing, and short video messages, even when other user is off-line. With the added capability of making paid call using Skype credits calls to landline as well as mobile numbers.