Tech Companies Wage War Over Messaging, ‘Apple’ And ‘Facebook’ Among Combatants

For a while, it seemed that the next stage of battle for tech companies was live streaming, with giants like “Facebook” and “Twitter” getting their own platforms for the feature, and paying a lot of money in the process. However, with “Apple” announcing that they will make their own “iMessage” service open to third-party developers and “Facebook” making their “Messenger” app as the default “Android” SMS, it seems that the war has gone back to involve text messaging.

As the Business Insider put it, “Facebook” re-released their “Messenger” SMS integration feature right after “Apple” announced their own service for a reason. For one thing, they didn’t want to lose out on the messaging market to “Apple.” For another, there is huge potential for monetization of messaging, according to BI analyst Will McKitterick.

“Messaging apps are about more than messaging,” BI wrote in their article. “The first stage of the chat app revolution was focused on growth. In the next phase, companies will focus on building out services and monetizing chat apps’ massive user base.”

“Facebook” already went down this road before, but its “Messenger” app hadn’t hit the massive popularity that it has now. As a result, they had to cancel the project back in 2014.

The social media giant is not alone in trying to take advantage of the boom either. Time listed other tech companies that are investing more and more in the evolving messenger market, including “Google” and “Microsoft.”

Time also highlighted a report on the huge role of messaging in Internet trend for the year, which states that it will be a big factor in the acquisition and dissemination of information among users. As such, taking advantage of this development in order to sell ad space or paid features for businesses to gain more customers is something that will naturally draw in the big tech brands.