Our way of communicating is constantly evolving and keeping in touch with friends and relatives is always easier and faster thanks to the use of instant messaging apps that allow us to reach anyone anywhere in the world, as long as you have an internet connection on the your smartphone.
Apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger allow you to send text messages, audio files, images and documents in real time. These are the pluses that have made it successful at the expense of the old SMS . Anyone has at least one app on their mobile phone that allows them to “text”, but what is the most popular messaging app in the world?
Similarweb researched data from Android devices from 187 countries and found that apps of this type are the most used around the world. It also identified which messaging app is the most used in each country .
[ here the interactive version of the map]
WhatsApp is confirmed as the world leader with a percentage of 55.6% of use: 109 countries have chosen it as their favorite app, including Italy , Brazil, Mexico, India, Russia and many countries of South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania.
In second place is Facebook Messenger , used in 49 countries including Australia, Canada and the United States of America.
Viber is the third app with mostly exclusive use in 10 countries including Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine. In particular, it appears that since April 2016 Viber has been installed on 65% of Ukrainian Android devices and has been used with an average of 16 minutes a day. However, the popularity of Viber also reaches other parts of the world such as Iraq, Libya and Sri Lanka.
Line , WeChat and Telegram are gradually gaining ground and are widely used in countries like Japan , China and Iran . In Japan they are so obsessed with Line that they use it for an average of 40 minutes a day.
Finally, there are apps with limited success to a single country: KakaoTalk in South Korea , imo in Cuba , Zalo in Vietnam , ChatOn in Eritrea and BBM in Indonesia .
In Indonesia, the vast majority of people use Blackberry BBM and since April 2016 the app has been installed on 87.5% of the country’s Android devices. In this regard, the existing difference with countries such as the United States where only 0.42% of Android users have installed the BBM app immediately catches the eye (followed by Australia and United Kingdom with a slightly higher use).
From this analysis it also emerges that in Asia there is a varied presence of messaging apps unlike countries such as South America where there is a uniformity of choice.
