Facebook looks to crack chat app riddle Facebook's launch this week of Home, its new "super app" for Android smartphones, has been seen as an attempt to undercut the dominant companies in mobile, Apple and Google. But with another new messaging feature, dubbed Chat Heads, it is also looking to fend off smaller competitors who threaten to displace it as the most popular way to converse with friends online. Messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Line, Viber and Tencent's WeChat have all attracted 100m users and analysts say that in some markets, they rival Facebook in daily activity. Facebook released its own such app, Facebook Messenger, in October 2011, while Apple's iMessage offers many of the same functions, albeit only for owners of Apple devices. The rise of standalone chat apps has continued unabated and Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg recognises the challenge. Asked by Wired magazine what would be the "next big trend" in social networking, he said: "The big stuff that we're seeing now is sharing with smaller groups." His consistent agenda at Facebook has been to push for people to share more widely and openly online, much to the distress of privacy advocates. But as smartphones proliferate, many people are choosing chat apps that keep their more intimate banter away from Facebook. Facebook users" average number of friends has swelled to 200, according to a Pew study last year, and 300 for 18 to 34-year-olds. By contrast, most people regularly call and text a much smaller group of people on their phones. "On the desktop, nobody will come along and do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace," says Benedict Evans of consultancy Enders Analysis. On mobile, that isn't the case at all. They, like everyone else, are experimenting to work it out. It's not clear what the right social experience is [on smartphones]. Chat Heads is Facebook's latest attempt to crack this problem. Combining Facebook messages and cellular text messaging in the same interface, it allows people to chat without switching constantly between apps. "Messaging and communication shouldn't only happen in certain places on your phone," Joey Flynn, Facebook's product manager, said on Thursday. While Facebook has 600m mobile users, WhatsApp and WeChat are gaining fast with 300m users each, estimates suggest, while Google is rumoured to be preparing a chat app of its own to extend its Gchat messaging service to smartphones. "Some of these guys, if you think in terms of how many people are using them every day, are much bigger than Facebook," Mr Evans says. Chat apps began to attract attention in 2011 when BlackBerry Messenger and start-ups had larger tech companies and mobile operators scrambling to build or buy their way into a market that was eating into text-messaging revenues. Analyst group Ovum has estimated chat apps cost $23bn in lost revenues for operators last year. Some operators" apps have floundered, and once-popular apps have sold up or faded away, raising questions about the sustainability of a standalone service that is not tied to a wider platform, such as Facebook or the iPhone. WhatsApp, which has remained high in Apple and Google's app store charts for two years, is hoping to address that challenge by shifting towards a yearly subscription, rather than a one-off upfront cost of $1, as it has previously charged on the iPhone. Despite being a small, 35-person start-up in Mountain View, California, WhatsApp users receive 8bn messages a day, up from 7bn in December and four times the 2bn daily iMessages that Apple said were sent in January. Some groups are looking to broaden their services into areas such as gaming or selling digital "stickers." Korea's KakaoTalk, which claims 84m users, says games helped it generate $6.3m in net profit last year. It remains to be seen if KakaoTalk, Japan's Line, and China's WeChat can achieve real scale outside their home markets. With 1bn users, Facebook is one of the few companies to achieve that sort of global popularity. Despite the internet's winner-takes-all tendencies, Mr Evans says that many users will use Facebook and standalone chat apps. "Unlike the broader social network, there doesn't have to be one thing for all," he says. It's not that Facebook's lost here, it's just that it hasn't won yet.