Messaging Apps & Platforms:
Comparative Analysis

Messaging apps are essential for our everyday activities including business communication, personal communication, and other domains. For some specific spheres such as journalism and protest activities secure messaging is one of the main issues.

Informational technologies development brought numerous advancements into messaging apps. Once suitable only for exchanging texts, most of them now allow voice messaging, voice calls, video calls, and numerous other features. At the same time, the cases associated with Edward Snowden, Pavel Durov, Cambridge Analytica eroded the public trust in secure and private messaging by revealing the facts of surveillance of private information from the social networks and messengers by governments and third parties. This created a backlash, with the appearance of security-focused apps which offer privacy as their main advantage. Nevertheless, with more attention to privacy, users still look for the convenience and price of the messengers.

For this study, we aim to scrutinize the most popular messengers to find out which of them combine the best user experience with the most robust security and privacy. The study separately assesses the most secure and the most convenient messaging apps, as well as the messaging apps harmonically combining those dimensions.