Messenger: One App to Rule Them All?

Here’s how it works now. You move about your phone’s home screen, find an app, tap the icon, zoom on in, play around a bit, hit the home button and jump into another app, double tap the home button and toggle between the apps, and repeat. Simple, but not exactly an elegant user experience.

If Facebook and Google and upstart competitors have their way, here’s how it will work. You send a text to your friend about a movie, then you text directly with AI “chatbots” in order to, in no particular order, look up the movie’s rating on Rotten Tomatoes, buy movie tickets, book a car to the theater, book a car home, write a scathing movie review on Rotten Tomatoes, order Chinese delivery, and then leave a five-star review because the General Chicken was the best you’ve had in years.

Your digital life, all your apps, rolled into one and accessed through some sort of Messenger app. Sound far fetched? Let’s take a trip to China, where users just love the app WeChat, using it to book vacations, order foods, and even, yes, chat with friends. Or how about Japan, where the Line app is lovingly used to book rides and as a payment service.

The future of mobile technology will see the hurdles between desire and action removed. With the help of ever-improving AI assistants like Siri and Google Now On Tap, the “Messenger OS” is the next step. Instead of bringing users to apps, evolving mobile operating systems are striving to bring apps to users, even before users asks for it.

At least in the United States, Apple and Google have a leg up as iOS and Android are by far the dominant mobile operating systems. But don’t discount Facebook, which has the single-most popular mobile app in the world, known as “the Facebook app,” as well as the fastest growing app, Facebook Messenger. We all laughed in 2014 when Facebook removed messaging functionality in order to force users to download Messenger. A year and a half later, Messenger’s numbers are approaching gaudy levels as users can group chat with up to 50 people and call anyone in your friends list for free. Why even pay for cell-service any more?

One has the sense Google and Apple will do everything to ensure users are using their own operating system rather than a proxy OS like Facebook. Some says this trend will spell the end of Google as we know it. As software companies get into hardware and hardware companies get into software, there will one day come a reckoning between these tech giants.

Here’s is what we do know. If your app provides any kind of service, it will most certainly behoove you in the near future to make sure your app plays nice with the APIs of these Messenger/OS hybrids. Because in three years when a virtual assistant inside your phone with Scarlett Johnson’s voice is serving up solutions to all your problems, you’ll want your app to be on the list.

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