Please, don’t make another chat app

It all started with ICQ, the very first chat app I had on my computer. It was good enough but had some drawbacks. At some point, its evolution slowed down, and the Skype has arisen. Skype was way cooler than ICQ, so most of my friends migrated to it. Then came Viber. It was the time when Skype’s mobile app really sucked (it still does), and Viber was so easy to switch to, because of this novel idea of not having an account, just a phone number. So, some of my contacts moved to Viber, and I’ve also installed Viber on my parent’s phones. Then I moved to U.S. and realized that people use Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp here, so I had to install those two. Fast forward a few years, and here’s the full list of chat apps installed on my smartphone today:

• Skype, to stay in touch with my old friends
• Viber, to stay in touch with my family
• Facebook Messenger (lite), to talk to most of my American friends
• WhatsApp, to talk to some of my American friends
• Google Hangouts, because it comes with Android and some people only know my email
• Telegram, because I had to talk to people, who are Telegram only
• Slack, because that’s where work happens
• LinkedIn, it has a built-in chat and people talk business there
• Sometimes Instagram serves as a chat because it has an integrated messaging
• Occasionally I get DMs on Twitter, though not too often
• I also have Allo and Duo, pre-installed by Google, but nobody really uses them

I don’t have WeChat, Snapchat or Vk but I could have had them too.

Now what happens is all these apps are always up, running in the background, draining my battery, using my mobile traffic and making me having to buy a new phone every two years, just because the old one can’t sustain it anymore. If I uninstall any of them, I’ll lose connection with some of my friends, and I obviously don’t want to do that. I can’t also ask everyone to migrate to one app, it’s just not possible.

Why am I complaining about all this?

Because today I saw the news that Facebook is testing a separate chat app for Instagram which, I assume will eventually replace a built-in messaging functionality, just like FB Messenger did. I think this should be stopped! Messenger is already the biggest battery hog I’ve ever seen and why would I want to install another one? I understand that the chat app market is very hot and everyone wants to have a share of it, but the fragmentation really leaves end users frustrated.

I can see from the article that they have their reasons for making Direct a standalone app, but I feel that a lot of people may have the same problem as me. Let me know whether you would want to use a another app for messaging in Instagram or not and why.