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By • 5:00 am, August 27, 2014 • • It's an iOS messaging shootout! Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac I recently watched The Lady try to convince a friend of ours to download WhatsApp. The friend is moving to the United Kingdom, and we want to stay in touch.
Devices it works with: iPad, iPhone, Mac. IMessages are kept in sync across all your devices, including the Mac Messages app. And that’s it. And that’s it. There’s no Web interface, which.
Our friend tried to say that email would do the job, but we all know that will never work. Our friend doesn’t want WhatsApp (maybe because ), and she doesn’t own an iPhone, so iMessage is out. Thankfully, there are plenty of free and good alternatives. Some are more secure, some have more features, and none of them is owned by Facebook. Let’s take a look at what’s available and how these very different messaging apps compare on a number of key features. Why messaging?
Messaging, unlike any other kind of communication, approximates they way people act when they’re really together. Nobody hangs out with a friend for an afternoon and then makes a long speech to summarize their thoughts for the day.
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We point at things and say, “Hey, look at that.” We deal in snippets. When I’m out and about, I use my iPhone to do this. Dvd data content cataloging app for macbook. I send iMessages to The Lady, sending her a photo of a place that rents out sewing machines by the hour, say.
I send pictures of trams to my trainspotter dad, and so on. The conversation is immediate, and works just like normal meatspace communication. But none of this matters if your friends aren’t on the same service as you. Unlike the olden days of IM, you can’t just collect all the services together in one app. Also unlike the olden days, we can keep all the apps on our phones and interact via notifications. It almost doesn’t matter which service folks use.
So today we’ll take a look at a bunch of messaging apps. We’ll see how well they do at plain text messaging, at sharing photos, at group chatting and — super-important these days — how they do with privacy.
Here’s the list, along with links, so you can play along as we rate the pluses and minuses of various contenders. • • • • • • • • iMessage I’ll start with the one we all know and (mostly) love: Apple’s Messages app. It has the advantage of being built-in, which means that even people who don’t install apps, or don’t want the bother of signing up for a service, can use it. I have all my family on and it Just Works (most of the time anyway). IMessage is Apple-only. How you sign up: Just switch it on in your iPhone’s settings app and enter your Apple ID. Vsco cam app for mac. Devices it works with: iPad, iPhone, Mac.
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IMessages are kept in sync across all your devices, including the Mac Messages app. And that’s it. There’s no Web interface, which means you can only use it on Apple devices. In iOS 8, non-cellular devices will also sync SMS messages. How it handles text: Just like sending SMS messages, although without limits on length. In fact, iMessages live in the same app as SMS messages.
There are no options to style text — no bold or italics — so you’ll have to settle for plain old words, numbers and emoji. How it handles photos: iMessage lets you send pictures from the built-in sharing sheet, sending them via iMessage direct from many apps. It fails to save incoming photos in your Camera Roll, though, which seems absurd. Group messaging: Terrible. Once you start a conversation with a group, you can’t remove or add anybody. And if you get sucked into a boring, high-volume chat, you can’t leave.
This will change in iOS 8, but right now group messaging in iOS 7 is pretty bad. Privacy/security: Great. Apple has on iMessage privacy. In short, the messages are encrypted between you and your conversation partner(s), so not even Apple can read them.
WhatsApp is the biggest messaging app ( active users) outside of Asia. In Europe, everyone has it. Between WhatsApp and iMessage, I have 90 percent of my friends covered. The app isn’t bad on iOS, but it has some limitations due to the way it works. However, since these limitations stem from the fact that WhatsApp can even work on dumb phones, they aren’t that big a problem. WhatsApp — everybody uses it. How you sign up: With WhatsApp, you use your phone number to sign up.
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This makes it dead easy, and it means no messing around with usernames and accounts. It lets you sign up even on dumb phones, but it limits the app to devices that have phone numbers (so you can’t get WhatsApp on your iPad, for example). Devices it works with: iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Android and Nokia. How it handles text: Plain text, just like the iMessages app. How it handles photos: Pretty well. You can set the app to auto-save any photos you receive to your Camera Roll, and in my testing it also saves photos you take. Editing is limited to cropping and rotating the image, which is fine, because your iPhone has plenty of photo-editing tools.