What we do in the shadows: The consumption of mobile messaging by social media mobile apps in the twilight of the social networking era

Abstract

The most significant change in mobile and social media has happened under our noses: the vampiric consumption of old-fashioned texting by social media mobile apps. Mobile messaging apps are among the most downloaded and used apps on earth (Statistica, 2022). For many people, mobile messaging is synonymous with Facebook and WhatsApp. Outside China, where WeChat dominates, over 2.5 billion people use these two Meta platforms for mobile messaging, and the company owns 90% of the mobile messaging market share in many places. This undercounts mobile messaging because Apple’s iMessage likely exceeds Facebook’s mobile messager app in size, and the Android messaging program is similar in size to Snapchat, Telegram, and QQ (the fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-ranked mobile messager apps respectively) (Statistica, 2022). Whatever you call it—texting, mobile instant messaging, direct messaging (DM), mobile chat—mobile messaging is, and long has been, an enormous part of the experience of mobile media. In this article, I will focus on messaging that occurs on mobile devices exclusively (i.e., smartphones), not desktopor laptop-accessed messenger programs. In the last five years, the boundaries between social media use (SMU) and mobile messaging have utterly blurred. Although Facebook introduced the DM in 2011, it wasn’t fully integrated with mobile devices until 2017 (Business of Apps, 2022). Earlier versions of social media messaging were bound to the platform, seldom used, and forgettable. Only in competition with WhatsApp and Snapchat and the rapid adoption of the