Voice — The Next Battlefield In The Messaging App Wars
Is voice call the magic key to reaching the next billion people?
WhatsApp and Google rushing voice call
WhatsApp, the biggest chat app on the planet (600+ million users), is going to launch voice calls in Q1 2015. They were intending to launch this earlier, but are delaying because they haven’t figured out how to get microphone access on certain phones (presumably J2Me/feature phones) and how to make the technology work well on 2G/Edge connections – which is common in countries like India.
Google recently sent top product manager Nikhyl Singhal to India and other countries to do user research. They are planning to release a WhatsApp-like chat app in 2015. One of the features they are looking into is “voice-to-text” for this product. With a literacy rate of around 73%, such voice features could be a great way of reaching a larger audience.
The app will not require a Google login, which is interesting because they have spent the last few years trying to integrate all of their communication products such as Google voice, Google talk and Gmail chat into one chat product, Hangouts.
They also recently introduced international voice calls and SMS in Hangouts for India. Now it appears they will again branch out a new chat/voice product to reach a larger audience.
First mover advantage
WhatsApp is probably the biggest and fastest growing chat app because they have focused on apps for feature phones and all other popular platforms, on minimalism and low data/memory usage. WhatsApp was also early on the market, and grew fast by having an easy to use address book integration and SMS invites. WhatsApp is the place where all of your friends are, just like Facebook. That’s why it actually works as an SMS replacement.
Skype, IM+, ICQ, Google voice, Fring and all the other mobile messenger apps with voice call functionality didn’t have the same level of integration into people’s existing contact list as WhatsApp and weren’t able to grow just as fast. Because of that, they weren’t able to truly disrupt network phone calls. With more and more people on smart phones, data connections and with address book integration, you can potentially reach all of your friends on chat/voice apps over an internet connection just as easily as calling them over the telecom network.
There are still hundreds of millions of people on feature/basic phones. Luckily many of them are moving over to smart phones, although the migration will take years.
This graph shows how the smart phone market is growing in India. Despite fast growth, it might still take somewhere between 5–10 years to get below 10% market share of feature phones. It’s definitely late to get into the dying feature phone market, but it’s not too late. Especially if you want the first mover advantage and reach a larger audience.
Facebook has in many ways disrupted e-mail, at least for private use. Chat apps are replacing SMS. Voice calls over the internet is probably the next disruption.
When you can reach at least 80% of your contacts through a chat/voice app, and at a cheaper price – that’s when there will be a tipping point. Being THE app for both chat and voice is all about being first to market and gaining the biggest market share as fast as possible. And that is what WhatsApp and Google are trying to do right now.
Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/andreakirkby/5432804073/
Success factors in emerging markets
The challenges when designing a product for countries like India and Indonesia are quite different than in more developed countries. Data plans are usually more expensive, the network might be slow and unstable, many are using low end phones and they might not have other social media accounts.
Here are some key success factors for voice call apps that want to win the market:
User Experience
Many of the voice apps are way too cumbersome to use. A solid UX design and UI efficiency (few clicks to perform a call) is vital providing voice calls to the masses. It’s not about the number of features, it’s about minimalism and quick calls-to-action.
Price
It has to be cheaper than network phone calls. In price sensitive markets where a lot of people have several sim cards for the sake of cheaper phone calls/SMS, price is everything. If users are already paying for an expensive data connection, they would of course want as many calls as possible for “free” within the limits of their data connection package.
App distribution
Getting onto the hundreds of millions of feature phones is not an easy task. Many transfer apps through Bluetooth (to save data usage) and it might take years to distribute an app. Download links through SMS, physical options (such as installing the app through a physical store) and Bluetooth are potentially better ways of distributing apps in emerging markets.
The app should also be able to auto update to newer versions, even on feature phones.
Performance and memory
This is the tricky one. If you are on an unstable 2G/Edge data connection, it will be hard to have a quality voice call. Compression and noise cancellation will be important.
Also, the ability to resume calls or switch over to voice/text messaging when the network fails is important.
Memory usage is also important. The app has to use very little memory so that it can run on any phone, and run in the background so that the user can receive calls at any time. Skype on Android is a well-known memory hog using way too much memory and battery. Personally, I always shut down Skype on Android after use to save battery. That will not work on low-end phones in emerging markets.
Address book integration
Forget searching and adding people from phone directories. Apps should automatically detect all emails, phone numbers, usernames etc and keep the contacts constantly updated. The users shouldn’t have to search and add people like they do in Skype – unless they want to. The list of people to call should be ready already the first time you use the app.
It should also be possible to launch the app directly from the address book, so that the user can make it the default app for calling.
Originally published at emergingux.com on November 4, 2014.
