Jongla, the Finnish instant messaging (IM) pioneer, is looking to combine social media with IM to deliver a more social way of doing IM.
The release of Jongla Social Messenger, a new iteration of its popular cross-platform messaging app, offers built-in social integration that includes reactions, the 3rd generation Jongla aims to bridge the gap between social networks and instant messaging.
Messaging apps have become the dominant platform on smartphones, surpassing social networks in terms of user numbers worldwide. The new direction Jongla is taking is down to how the team has seen the messaging industry shift since launching in 2012. The trend of today shows that people, especially in emerging markets, are replacing their social networking apps usage with instant messengers.
“The lines between social networking and messaging apps usage are blurring and we firmly believe that soon the two will meet. We’re seeing this already with chatbots. Jongla is ahead of this curve, offering new meaningful social layers to our instant messaging service and enabling our users to enjoy the best of them both,” explains Riku Salminen, CEO, Jongla.
In addition to chatting, Jongla users can now discover and interact with new friends based on their location with a built-in community feature called ‘People’. The feature was designed to enable users to be able to discover interesting new people around them. To protect user privacy, only an approximate location is given and the feature is optional.
“We are continuing to make Jongla more social without sacrificing the essence of it all – private messaging”, added Salminen. “For those who want to broaden their horizons to discover and interact with new friends, the community of nearby people is only one tap away.”
Also added to Jongla’s Social Messenger is the ability to engage with user profiles with a choice of reaction. Reactions can be exchanged between people in Jongla’s community to express emotions from a simple thumbs-up, smile or even a virtual flirtation with a heart.
“Our emotions towards other people might sometimes be hard to put into words. We wanted to give our users a way to express their friendship or interest towards new people in a meaningful and fun way,” describes Salminen.
Within the next two years, a whole new generation of mobile natives – roughly a billion people – will access the mobile Internet, mostly via low-end smartphones with prepaid plans. Emerging markets, the driver of this growth, still suffer from low connectivity and the high cost of data. Jongla is growing fast in these areas with their optimised messaging solution. In 2015, Jongla become the world’s lightest messaging app in an effort to help people save money and data. According to their studies, Jongla uses 80% less data compared to Viber and 25% less data compared to Facebook Messenger*. Jongla also takes a fraction of data to download compared to all major competitors**.
“Jongla remains very economical in terms of data usage and the cost related to this. From download to daily use, Jongla saves people money. It makes all the difference for the people with limited and costly prepaid data plans,” finished Salminen.
Jongla is available to download for free from the App Store, Google Play, Windows Phone Store, and Firefox Marketplace
