• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, January 12, 2015

I always thought that the remarkable rise of messaging apps over the past two years was a welcome reminder of the fundamentals of smartphones. For the majority of consumers, they are first and foremost about person-to-person communication with the people they care most about.

The hubris around mobile technology and especially mobile marketing has presumed on some undeclared level that consumers just couldn’t wait for their “beloved” brands to be in their pocket. Oh, the relationships we will all have together, was the subtext of the hype.

But so far as consumers have always been concerned, person-to-person connections form the core of the platform. The unexpected dominance of SMS in the early years of pre-smartphone mobility was the first clue. Here was a format that was never intended as a consumer-facing product. Before QWERTY keyboards, the multi-tap method of typing on feature phones was as tortuous a method of communication as smoke signals or Morse Code -- and yet an entire generation embraced it as their own personal code. This should have taught us important lessons about what really mattered to the consumers we were trying to lull into our shopping and news apps.

And as I say the meteoric rise of the messaging app of late was a well-timed reminder of this central power of personal connections and identity in defining what this mobile technology is all about to real people, not marketers.

And so it is significant that the most recent comScore tracking (via GigaOm) of unique visitors to major messaging apps in the US shows a notable flattening of growth since summer. In fact market leader SnapChat appears to have peaked at just over 25 million users last May, followed be declines and then leveling out at about 21 million in September and October.

Second most popular messaging app Kik had a steady climb all year, peaking at about 16 million uniques in August, about 15 million in October.

Curiously, Facebook acquisition WhatsApp is a distant third, at about 7 million users in October and flat for many months.

Keep in mind comScore was only tracking five apps (we don’t see Tango in there, for instance), and publishers almost always claim considerably larger numbers than comScore does. comScore also only measures 18 and older users, so we are neither counting younger teens nor tracking a potential area for growth.

Also, these metrics are only measuring audience, not engagement. Perhaps understanding from the start that chat has always had a limited appeal, these companies all have been working to enhance the content available in the app beyond messaging functions. Some of them seem to aspire to become platforms for partners or even include so many browser, newsfeed features, etc. that they feel like tiny operating systems that replace other app functions.

Still, the metrics are suggestive on a comparative basis and remind us of the highly fragment nature of the mobile experience, how much of it is driven by group and personal taste, and how far removed this world is from the mass media culture that preceded it.