Mobile analyst Dean Bubley, on the other hand, is clearly unimpressed with the coverage of this subject. In a somewhat irate blog post today, he attacked the notion that there is a simple dichotomy between SMS and “over-the-top” (OTT) apps such as WhatsApp, along with the idea that the carriers’ Joyn collaboration might save their bacon:

“A central theme in these articles is a supposed battle for the ‘messaging market’, with lazy journalists or vendor marketeers painting a dark picture of mortal combat between the righteous fortress of SMS revenues, the marauding hordes of barbarian OTT players at the gates, and the Knights of Joyn riding to the rescue in their shining armour of interoperability.

“This is all palpable nonsense — a strawman argument to reframe a complex and dynamic situation into the usual fatuous and imaginary Us vs. Them, Telcos vs OTTs narrative, coupled to a desperate attempt to make RCS and its GSMA-branded offspring look relevant. Not only is this argument flawed, the likely outcomes will in many cases be worse than useless.”

What really gets Bubley’s goat is the idea that there actually is a “messaging market” as such. As he points out, there is little to compare between a WhatsApp chat and an embedded customer support IM conversation, or between an SMS exchange and an email with a document attached. They’re all messaging, but they’re not the same thing at all.

And what’s more, each one of those scenarios could be supported by a variety of “messaging” technologies:

“Any worthwhile analysis would look at various ways to slice up this supposed monolithic market into separate buckets reflecting context or intent. Perhaps social messaging vs. advertising vs. standalone information vs. gossip vs. B2B meeting arrangement vs. one-way app updates. Or sliced by length of a messaging ‘session’ or number of participants, or a hundred other ways.”

This is very true, and it has me thinking about what we mean when we talk about messaging. But it also has me thinking about our use of other terms, in particular the word “social”.

Facebook, for example, is a service we would think of as quintessentially social — but it’s also a messaging service. Just look at Facebook Home, where the social network takes over the user’s Android handset in a way that effectively melds Facebook messaging and SMS. When you’re sending a message through that interface, which medium are you using? Who cares?

When I was talking to Viber CEO Talmon Marco ahead of today’s desktop app launch, he characterized his Skype-rivaling product in interesting terms:

“We’re starting to see the lines between communication and social are breaking. Once you go into groups and larger groups — today we support groups of up to 40 people — and put a picture in there, is that a communication or social?

“I exchange Viber messages hundreds of times a day. On Facebook I share something once a week, once every two weeks. I’m always thinking twice about what I put on Facebook. I find myself more engaged with an app like Viber than with Facebook. I create far more content for Viber than with Facebook and I think the same applies to most people.”

Most people, of course, aren’t the CEO of Viber, but his underlying point is nonetheless valid. “Messaging” and “social” are merely two facets of modern communications (which can itself be a subset of some other service) and trying to tease the two apart is increasingly difficult.

Which brings us back to Bubley’s post. As I suggested above, I don’t think it’s entirely fair to discount the recognition of OTT apps’ acceleration past traditional SMS. However, it is certainly true that clear-cut comparisons between the various messaging options out there today are near-impossible, if not futile.

Ultimately, messaging is increasingly just a feature, as is the case with social. When you’re designing the communications services of the future, or even the services that make use of communications, context and intent are what count.

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But now the Cyprus-headquartered startup has taken things to a whole new level with its Viber 3 version: it’s released a desktop app for OS X and Windows, making it a full-blown alternative for Skype’s core user base. At the same time, Viber has also beefed up its Android and iOS apps, while introducing support for eight new languages (reaching a total of 27).

“Viber for desktop lets you do pretty much everything that Viber lets you do on your mobile phone, with minor exceptions such as stickers,” Viber CEO Talmon Marco explained to me. “What puts it apart from Skype is how tightly integrated it is with the mobile experience. Skype went from the desktop to the phone. Viber went from mobile to desktop — the implication for the user is amazing.”

Hello desktop

“Amazing” might be a tad hyperbolic, but Viber’s cross-platform integration is genuinely impressive.

As someone who has a greater variety of smartphones and tablets than most (hey, it’s my job), I can attest to one of Skype’s most annoying quirks – its inability to recognize on one device that I’ve already read the day’s messages on another device. This isn’t an issue with Viber.

“Another annoying thing is my wife always complained that would leave Skype running on my computer at home and every message I exchanged with somebody [while on another computer] would beep,” Marco said. “Viber doesn’t – when you get a message, it beeps at both places. Depending on where you answer the message, the next messages only beep on that device.”

Small things, but useful. A far more major advantage is the ability to quickly and simply transfer calls between devices and network types. So you want to start a call on your home desktop, then pop it over to your Wi-Fi connected smartphone, then maintain the call as you leave the house and move onto a cellular network? It should work.

Ironically, I find this all a bit reminiscent of Telefonica’s Tu Go play, which extends the functionality of that carrier’s phone number-linked mobile services to the desktop. Marco doesn’t see Viber as being in direct competition with the cellular giant’s “over-the-top” app but, as the lines between traditional and new-style messaging functionality continue to blur, I think the similarities between the two are worth calling out.

After all, both essentially extend the same services across both mobile and desktop platforms while using the mobile phone number as the key to the user’s identity. When Tu Go came out, it struck me that this number was one of the carrier’s most underappreciated weapons in the fight against third-party communications services – now that Viber’s also exploiting it on the desktop, though, I’m not so sure.

The desktop Viber app also allows video calls, in the style of Skype and Google+. This isn’t available for the mobile apps just yet, though – it will be, Marco promised – and it also doesn’t allow group videoconferencing at this point.

Mobile revamp

Viber’s announcements today aren’t all about the desktop. For one thing, we now have the full new version for BlackBerry, which – as we reported last month — finally includes VoIP functionality. This makes Viber the first mass-market VoIP provider to offer such a feature on the platform.

However, as we noted when covering the beta, it’s only available for versions 5 and 7 of the platform. According to Marco, this is because Viber has to implement IP-based voice on BlackBerry in a slightly roundabout way (“pretty much recording and playing back”), which makes latency a serious issue on BlackBerry OS 6, but less so on 5 and 7. Even on the supported versions, “users should manually set the APN settings to do 3G – there’s no way around that,” he warned.

Users on iOS will find their updated app now includes video messaging capabilities: previously, you could send photos and locations, but not videos. “Last online” status has also been introduced, bringing Viber in line with WhatsApp on that front – Marco admitted that he himself wasn’t sure how useful this would be, given Viber’s push notifications, but “it’s there.”

Other tweaks on iOS include the ability to search contacts specifically for groups, rather than having to scroll through individual contacts to find them, and the introduction of a new voice engine “that provides better performance on low bandwidth or in poor network conditions.” The aforementioned ability to roam between Wi-Fi and 3G coverage is also a new feature, and the overall app design has evolved.

The Android version gets the same features as the iOS app, but also a hefty redesign. It previously looked very much like the iOS version but is now all Holo — as Marco put it, “the iOS version looks iOS and the Android version looks Android.”

Next trick

Viber now has 200 million users, Marco said. This is the same number WhatsApp announced less than a month ago, but it’s important to note that WhatsApp’s 200 million users are active on the service at least once a month, while Viber is only talking about the number of its registered users. That said, Marco claimed that the majority of those users did use the service last month.

Given the fact that Viber VoIP calls only sometimes use Skype-esque peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, often going through Viber’s servers instead, this means the company has to spend a lot of money on servers – “We’re probably one of the largest users of Amazon Web Services,” Marco said, while conceding that his firm is still generating zero revenue.

So when is Viber going to start monetizing its service, then? This year, apparently. According to Marco, the company will start selling stickers to its users, along with other, as-yet-undefined “value adds.”

How about an enterprise play? After all, the addition of the desktop app makes Viber an increasingly credible unified communications service. “We have nothing to announce at this point in time, but we think that the desktop offering gets us closer to this,” Marco said.

Whatever happens, there’s no question that 2013 will be a very exciting year for the rapidly evolving Viber.

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We now know this for a fact, courtesy of analysts at Informa. As Europe’s digital chief, Neelie Kroes, greeted the news on Monday morning:

It's official: chat apps have overtaken SMS globally. The cash cow is dying. Time for telcos to wake up & smell the data coffee.—
Neelie Kroes (@NeelieKroesEU) April 29, 2013

Informa says 2012 saw nearly 19 billion messages sent over these apps each day around the world, versus 17.6 billion SMS messages. The analyst house reckons the contrast will be even starker in 2014, with 21 billion text messages projected, against almost 50 billion app-based messages.

As you will note, this suggests that SMS volumes will continue to increase, at least in the short term. Nonetheless, it is clear that the big growth is to be found in, er, the data coffee – spurred along by the likes of Nokia, which is now selling phones with dedicated WhatsApp keys.

However, things may not be as bleak for the mobile operators as they seem.

Hazy picture

First off, while the volumes of non-SMS messages has overtaken that of traditional texts, the user numbers remain significantly lower – although how much lower is a bit unclear.

According to Informa analyst Pamela Clark-Dickson, there were 3.5 billion SMS users in 2012. Regarding the chat apps, Clark-Dickson only took 6 into account, namely WhatsApp, BlackBerry Messenger, Viber, Nimbuzz, Apple’s iMessage and KakaoTalk. At the end of 2012, she said, there were 586.3 million users of these platforms, but that’s not taking into account other giants such as Facebook Messenger for Android (somewhere between 100-500 million installations) and China’s TenCent (around 300 million users).

Even if there were, let’s say, a billion chat app users, the disparity between message volume and user numbers shows that people who use these “over-the-top” (OTT) apps use them more frequently than those who use SMS – specifically, the average OTT app user sends 32.6 messages a day, and the average SMS user just 5 texts. This stands to reason because OTT apps are generally free to use, so we should therefore be wary of assuming that every OTT message represents a “lost” SMS from a revenue perspective, in much the same way as it’s illogical to claim that a free “pirated” song download represents a lost sale.

Those chat app users are probably also SMS users, because – for example – WhatsApp is of little use when you’re trying to message someone on a different platform (or someone with a basic dumbphone). There, SMS is and remains the great leveller: any mobile phone can use it. This is particularly important for some enterprises.

Whither Joyn?

And then we have a big unanswered question: even when SMS tails off, how big a chunk of the IP-based messaging market will the carriers themselves own?

Thing is, Informa’s analysis of the market does not include projections for Joyn, the industry-wide drive to create a common, interoperable messaging and file-sharing platform that works on all (or at least most) operators’ devices — Joyn has only just kicked off, so there are no real takeup figures from which to extrapolate. Precedent suggests that the mobile industry is incapable of acting in concert, but that doesn’t mean it can’t buck the trend when its back is against the wall.

“Mobile operators do have the opportunity to provide their own IP-based messaging applications,” Clark-Dickson noted.

And then we have services such as Telefonica’s Tu Go and Rogers’s One Number that extend traditional handset functionality onto the desktop. These services heavily blur the line between SMS and IP-based messaging – if the carriers can pull off this sort of thing while monetizing it in some way, what does it matter whether the medium used is technically SMS or something else?

Also don’t forget that carriers can build offerings around these third-party apps. For example, WhatsApp has partners with 3 Hong Kong and RCom, which sell flat-rate bundles specifically for WhatsApp use while at home or roaming. It may break the principle of net neutrality, but it’s a tactic some carriers are employing.

Either way, though, what’s clear is the speed at which all this is happening. The SMS is 20 years old and chat apps have only been around for around 5 years. Although we should take care when predicting the results, the trend of IP-based messaging replacing SMS certainly appears unstoppable.

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The Asha 210, which will come in both single- and dual-SIM versions with retail prices starting at $72, has a physical QWERTY keyboard and is therefore well-suited to messaging and social networking services. The handset will come with a free subscription to WhatsApp, which usually costs $0.99 a year, and the service is also integrated with the 210′s phonebook.

“We are very excited about our partnership with Nokia Asha complementing our strategy of giving people around the world an easy experience when keeping in touch with their friends,” WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton said in a statement.

Like other Asha phones, the device runs the Series 40 operating system. Nokia started calling the touchscreen Asha phones (of which the 210 is not one) “smartphones” last year, much to the annoyance of some observers, but in some ways that was a fair move: after all, Series 40 handset owners also get to download apps from an app store that contains many of the offerings familiar from Android and iOS. The social experience that is the focus for many “proper” smartphone users can be found here too, albeit in a slightly cut-down fashion.

The Asha 210 comes preloaded with YouTube, Twitter and Facebook (the recently-launched Asha 205 came with a dedicated Facebook button) and a 2MP camera with its own hard key. As with the 205, a feature called Slam makes it possible to share content with nearby Bluetooth phones without having to pair the devices. The phone’s battery lasts for up to 46 days on the single-SIM version, and up to 24 days on the dual-SIM version – you don’t see this kind of longevity on a typical touchscreen phone.

This is a great deal for WhatsApp, particularly as many of its key rivals – such as Tencent’s WeChat — are strongest in the emerging markets where Nokia’s low-end devices are sold. These alternatives can still be found in Nokia’s S40 app store, but users should be effectively steered in WhatsApp’s direction by the inclusion of the hard key. A reminder of the numbers here: WhatsApp may have 200 million users, making it “bigger than Twitter”, but WeChat has 300 million users.

And from the Nokia perspective, the Asha 210 is a reminder of what can be done with the now-aged S40 platform in certain markets. This device will be going up against very low-end Android phones, which offer a much wider range of apps but not necessarily better performance (and seriously, battery life is a major issue in many of these markets), and the soon-to-be-released Firefox OS phones, which are HTML5-only and as such an unknown quantity at this point. Given its social chops, the 210 will be a fairly impressive contender for many users.

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“We’re bigger than Twitter today,” he said at the Dive into Mobile conference. “More than 200 million active users monthly.”

Those people are also sending a lot of messages: WhatsApp users get 8 billion inbound messages per day and send over 12 billion per day.

The app, which is on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and Symbian, came to prominence because it allows cross-platform messaging; it’s like if you could send an iMessage to anyone regardless of the mobile operating system they are using.

Koum said WhatsApp has a global focus and that the app is big everywhere, but he said that it is most popular in Germany, Spain, the Latin America region, Mexico, Singapore and Hong Kong.

He also addressed those pesky acquisition rumors that have dogged the company in the last month. In the past he’s denied them, and on Tuesday he expanded on those earlier comments. “Our goal is to build a sustainable independent company. We’re not building a company to sell,” he said. “We want to show the world you can build a business that’s not driven by advertising,” which he says the app will never have. The company instead charges 99 cents for its iOS app; the app is free on other platforms for one year, but $1.99 per year after.

However, he did avoid a question about whether there is a price at which they would sell, saying, “We don’t think about selling.”

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Libon appeared for iOS in November last year, giving Orange a clear competitor to so-called over-the-top (OTT) applications such as Skype and WhatsApp. Like T-Mobile USA’s Bobsled and Telefonica’s Tu Me, the app provided free HD calls and messaging to other users of the same platform — regardless of their carrier — as well as voicemail transcription.

Now it’s available on Android as well as iOS. According to Giles Corbett of the Orange Vallée R&D department, the Android version is “completely integrated” into the native OS in a way that isn’t possible with iOS (see also, Facebook Home). “For instance, it integrates all of your incoming and outgoing GSM calls and SMSs in all of the conversations,” he noted, adding that setup, including the redirection of voicemail, could all be controlled from within the app.

On the iOS side, meanwhile, the new version — to be set live on Tuesday — will remain a step ahead of its Android counterpart, with the integration of audio chat (as in, conducting an asynchronous conversation using audio messages) and photo messaging. That said, Corbett said this functionality would be added to the Android version in the coming weeks.

I asked Corbett how Orange’s OTT efforts were keeping pace with developments such as Telefonica’s Tu Go, which gives O2 U.K. contract customers a Wi-Fi-capable app through which they can make and receive calls and texts using their existing number, with charges being integrated with their standard bill.

Corbett responded by pointing out that Libon creates a similar experience for customers of certain Orange operators. For example, customers of Orange’s low-cost Sosh brand in France can use Libon to call landlines and mobile numbers on “advantageous terms”, with call recipients seeing the caller’s standard number and — for calls to certain countries, at least — with charges coming out of their standard allowance.

Meanwhile, Orange Poland is to adopt a similar strategy, and by the end of June Libon will be integrated with core Orange services in 5 countries. For those who just want to use it as an OTT app alongside core services from other carriers, availability stretches to 95 countries. “It’s a way for Orange to reach and explore new customer bases,” Corbett said.

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In a statement on Wednesday, the Cyprus-based startup said the new version of its BlackBerry app, which was previewed in January, included free calls to other Viber users for those on BlackBerry OS5 and OS7, as well as “performance improvements” for OS5 and various other bug fixes. However, BlackBerry 10 – the make-or-break latest version of the platform – is not supported.

“BlackBerry is one of the most important markets for us and represents our third largest user base,” Viber CEO Talmon Marco said. “We are thrilled to bring this community free voice calling, letting them communicate freely with all of their important contacts across multiple platforms.”

The release means that, over two years after Viber first hit the scene, the only remaining major platforms on which Viber is a voiceless, text-and-photo-only service are Nokia Series 40 and Samsung’s Bada OS. The omission of BlackBerry 10 support isn’t as crazy as it might sound — most BlackBerry users will still be on older versions of the platform, and the company is still launching new BlackBerry OS7 devices in emerging markets.

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The carriers hate OTT apps because – they claim – they don’t make any money off them. This is nonsense, of course: when they’re not being blocked or throttled by the operators, the use of these apps drives the sales of new devices, and of the data services themselves. The real reason carriers hate them is because they’re often better rivals to the carriers’ own legacy services, including voice (Skype, for example) and SMS (WhatsApp).

And so the carriers have been experimenting with services that act as direct rivals to the likes of Skype and WhatsApp: Orange has Libon, T-Mobile USA has Bobsled and Telefonica has Tu Me. The problem is, these apps all just do what their third-party rivals do. For the carriers that are putting them out, they act as little more than brand ambassadors. They don’t actually create much value for the carriers’ existing customers, nor are their new platforms innovative enough to lure users from third-party rivals.

Until now. Someone has finally got the point. The carrier in question is Telefonica again, and the app – now available for O2 UK contract customers only – is called Tu Go. The proposition is very simple. Using the Tu Go app on Android, iOS or the PC, subscribers can make and receive calls and texts over Wi-Fi using their normal mobile number. The calls and texts come out of their standard allowances.

But surely it’s better to use a new-generation platform, I hear you say. Not always. For example, I work from home and I call people using Skype an awful lot, largely because the mobile coverage in my apartment is dreadful. Skype’s cheaper than mobile in most cases, but it doesn’t show the recipient of my calls the phone number printed on my business cards. Also, it means having multiple billing accounts. With a service like Tu Go, problem solved.

This isn’t trying to create yet another platform. All it’s doing is using the power of the app to bring legacy functionality into the modern age; to make it more useful. Telefonica has realized that you don’t fight the upstart by creating a separate platform to your core product: you adapt and extend your core product instead.

Will it be enough to fend off the upstarts? For some users, it will; for those who gave up on their mobile operator a while back, it won’t. But it’s the first OTT app I’ve seen from a carrier that doesn’t feel like they’re flailing around in response to their IP-only rivals. Having covered this stuff for a while, I could weep with joy.

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However, with Facebook’s recent addition of voice calling to its Messenger app, the company is poised to demonstrate to the mobile industry the benefits – and power – of scale, first hand. And in what can only be described as the perfect murder, Facebook is now in a position to effectively kill the traditional telephone, starting with the phone number.

How it could work

The implementation of Facebook’s voice features are straightforward yet unique: You make a call by tapping a name, not a number, a username, or any other type of identifier. You’re calling a social connection. That in itself is not shocking, but Facebook can go even further. Its database already contains the phone number of tens of millions of people. (For fun, just type a friend’s phone number in the Facebook search bar, and you’ll likely see their profile pop up instantly.)

This means it could offer streamlined interoperability with existing phone networks in a way that a company like Skype, Viber, Whatsapp — or smaller voice calling startups — can’t so easily manage. Further, all the pages you “like” on Facebook have numbers connected to them, so calling a business is just as simple and at-hand as calling a friend. In the near future then, you will call a business via Facebook on the basis of a friend’s request or a like. No more unwanted calls. No more Yellow Pages. No more looking up a phone number you can’t remember. Just a connection.

What of the gatekeepers?

The real question is how existing gatekeepers of the mobile industry – namely phone carriers and manufacturers – will respond to this apparent threat to their apparent core business. The first, familiar route is to stick to their guns. Put up a blockade, offer low-level crippled integration, or just try to ignore it and hope it just goes away.

Or, they could embrace the disruption with open arms. Carriers need to realize that as the unlimited plan dies, there’s huge opportunity in sending more and more communication over a pay-per-use data line. (They just need to bill their customers in a transparent way.)

This second option would also include supporting Facebook’s interoperability with normal phone numbers. That means you’d be able to call grandma via Facebook whether or not she even has a Facebook account (or even knows what it is) – her old landline will ring just as easily. And when grandma calls you, your Facebook app picks up the call, using number forwarding that’s comparable to Google Voice.

Manufacturers could offer Facebook deeper integration as well. Currently VoIP calls on your iPhone don’t feel like a normal phone call, but they could if Apple were to allow Facebook to control or mimic the iPhone’s Phone app. (While that might sound impossible, don’t forget that Facebook is already integrated in the Contacts app – it is already on the iOS platform in a major way.) And Android is already giving Skype and other VoIP apps ways to generate an incoming call on a phone without sending an often overlooked push notification. Apple can go this route as well.

And now, the future

It’s safe to assume that Facebook is deep in talks already with operators and manufacturers to create a partnership that benefits all of them. To date though, even major VoIP companies like Skype have been unsuccessful in pulling this off. Facebook has a scale that even Skype needed at one point to reach enough people for VoIP calling to become ubiquitous. It won’t stop with this recent addition to the Messenger app. There’s too much for the company to win. (Yes, that includes blocking competitors.)

That Facebook phone you keep hearing about? I believe it’s an app. Sure, it could pull a Google Chrome and try and completely replace a broken platform with its own, but it doesn’t need to – its scale forces partners to listen. Facebook can kill the phone as we know it simply by rebuilding it as an app. It can completely replace Messenger, and it won’t have the voice call option as hidden as it is right now.

It will allow you to communicate through text, voice, and ultimately even video chat. It will use data, lots of it, and carriers might even learn to enjoy billing you for that on a pay-per-use basis. It will work over Wi-Fi too, which will come in handy as 4G LTE networks become more widespread. It will improve the quality of your call in the same way the CD improved the quality of your record collection.

And, by using a huge database of phone numbers, it will even let you call keep in touch with anyone stuck using that dated technology. “Grandma? This is Robert! I’m calling you on Facebook. No, it’s not a phone… .”

Disclosure: One of Karma’s minority investors is currently employed by Facebook, as a designer for products unrelated to this story.

Robert Gaal is co-founder of mobile data startup Karma. Follow him on Twitter @robertgaal. 

Photo courtesy of bluefish/Shutterstock.com.

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