Can Chat Apps Co-Exist? The Peculiarities Of Asia’s Walled Gardens

Credit: userlike.com

When I sat down with Rita Nguyen a few weeks ago to chat about her project, Squar, Myanmar’s first homegrown social network, she threw out a pretty interesting idea: Is it possible that users will keep multiple chat apps on one phone?

As we all know, any one user is likley to have Line, KakaoTalk, WeChat, Whatsapp, and Viber all on one phone. In other words, they’re not competing anymore. Comparing them in the same way that we look at Facebook and Google+ doesn’t make much sense. They’re not taking users away from each other in the same way that the social media giants are.

For me and many other Vietnamese smartphone users, I’ve got my American and foreign friends on Whatsapp, I’ve got my Vietnamese friends on Viber and Zalo, I’ve got my Chinese friends on WeChat, my Korean friends on KakaoTalk, and my Japanese, Thai, and Singaporean friends on Line. Give or take a few chat apps, of course.

Thus, is it any wonder why apps like Line can double in size in just six months? For the everyday user, it’s not as much of a big deal to add another chat app, since with notifications, an app being tied to one phone number or account, and the ease of texting make it easy to sign up and use multiple chat apps. But the real draw is being able to access your friends. Users will just go where their friends are. Shirking a service is like shirking my friends.

So thinking about the chat app battle in terms of a “battle” is now passé. Users don’t leave chat apps the same way they leave most social media sites, and chat apps are largely very strong in revenue. They’re basically growing the same chat app messaging pot together, they’re not trying to take the pot from each other.