The average smartphone user spends 2 hours and 20 minutes a day or 70 hours on social media apps every month and 55% of the population, or 4.88 billion people, have social media accounts. It is the most popular type of internet service, responsible for hundreds of billions of interactions every day. In the late 1990s, as the internet was moving to web 2.0 stage, several online messaging and social networks launched with new multimedia services, propelling them to new levels of popularity. Liv...| Business of Apps
Pinterest is an image search platform, which functions somewhat like an online mood board. Users pin images they like to boards. Images are uploaded by users, and can then be re-pinned by others. Pinterest was launched by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp in 2010. Silbermann had previously worked in the advertising department at Google. Prior to Pinterest, Silbermann and Sciarra launched an app called Tote, which failed to gain traction. Launched on March 2010 to family and friends,...| Business of Apps
With the apparent self-implosion at Twitter, Instagram-parent Meta launched into the microblogging scene with Threads. Aimed at users and advertisers fed up with Twitter’s handling following the Musk takeover, it made a large splash in the first week with over 100 million sign-ups. This was helped along by Twitter announcing it had temporarily limited the amount of tweets users could view in one day. Threads works in a similar way to Twitter, where a mix of short posts from accounts followe...| Business of Apps
95% of users claim Snapchat makes them feel happy. This is just one out of many Snapchat statistics we have in store for you.| TrueList
Signal, formed through a merger of RedPhone and TextSecure, is the flagship app of the Signal Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to open-source privacy technology. The software which underpins the Signal app has been imported onto WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Skype and Google Allo, although end-to-end encryption is not offered by default on these platforms. It launched the Signal app in 2015 for iOS, Android and desktop, which came with end-to-end encrypted messaging. Signal has since added ...| Business of Apps
Over three billion people have used messaging apps in 2021, making them one of the most popular app types. For most people, mobile messaging consists of two platforms: Facebook and WhatsApp. Collectively, over 2.5 billion people use one of these two platforms, in some markets the two apps hold over 90 percent marketshare. This dominance has led to alternative messaging communities which look to be the opposite of Facebook. Telegram and Signal were both founded with strong pro-encryption ideal...| Business of Apps
LINE is a Japanese instant messenger app, produced by the eponymous corporation. In Asia, the most popular instant messenger apps have evolved to become platforms in their own right. On these, users can play games, send money, shop and much more. WeChat in China is perhaps the most prominent and diverse example. Across the Sea of Japan, LINE offers a similar service. The app was originally developed as an emergency solution for company (then known as NHN Japan) employees during the Tōhoku e...| Business of Apps
Facebook probably needs no introduction; nonetheless, here is a quick history of the company. The world’s biggest and most-famous social network was launched by Mark Zuckerberg while he was a student at Harvard University, in early 2004. TheFacebook, as it was then known, was originally intended to serve a digitised version of the ‘face books’ held by Harvard’s various colleges, which were paper directories containing images and personal information about students. Initially limited t...| Business of Apps
BeReal is the newest social app to make its mark, coming at a time when many were disillusioned with Instagram and its focus on algorithmic content. In 2022, it broke out in the US and UK with millions switching to the app, but has struggled to retain those users long term. Built by ex-GoPro employee Alexis Barreyat and Kévin Perreau and launched in late 2019, the basic premise of the app is to take a photo with the back and front camera at a random time each day. The impromptu nature of the...| Business of Apps
WhatsApp is a messaging app for smartphones created in 2009 by two former Yahoo employees, Brian Acton and Jan Koum. It was Koum who saw the potential of operating through the Apple App Store after purchasing an iPhone in early 2009. The app initially focused on statuses; Koum later revealed that part of his motivation was to stop missing calls while he was the gym. Users quickly came to use this as an instant messaging service, planting the seed for what the app would become. WhatsApp 2.0 i...| Business of Apps
WeChat was launched in 2011 as Weixin, Mandarin for ‘micro-message’. As the name suggests, it originally functioned as a simple messenger app, a Chinese equivalent to WhatsApp in essence. WeChat was developed by and belongs to Chinese tech behemoth Tencent, one of the most valuable companies in the world. Other names in the Tencent stable include QQ Messenger and Tencent Music. Though it started as a simple messenger platform, WeChat has become far more than that. Through its mini program...| Business of Apps
Social networking platforms are locked in a never-ending game of high-stakes musical chairs. Every year, the whims of a fickle public, the introduction of new players, and shifting global trends trigger a shuffle in social media’s| Dreamgrow
Twitter is a real-time microblogging platform, publicly launched in July 2006. At launch, its defining features were the tight limits placed on each post, known at a tweet. Originally, users could only use 140 characters, although that has been elongated over the years. Formed by former Odeo employees Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, the site originally used SMS to send tweets onto the network. It received its first boost of users at SXSW 2007, when the founders showed al...| Business of Apps