Mobile Web Application Facebook Messenger & Google Hangouts

Introduction

The webs applications on the mobile have been a great development in the field of information and technologies (Dalmasso et al. 2013). In addition to this, the chatting Apps also have great impact on the development of this apps. The report consists of discussions about two of these apps. The Facebook Messenger and the Google Hangouts application taken up for discussions in this report.

Overview of the Applications:

Facebook Messenger: The Facebook messenger is a very useful application. It one of the most popular application for the purpose of social networking (Bailis et al. 2016). In addition to this, the application helps the people to get connected to the people of their choices. In addition to this the application is one of the most downloaded app on the android platform. This app is developed by the Facebook Company. This application is only used for the messaging function of social networking website Facebook. The app do not require any additional information about the email or the phone number of the user. They only require a valid Facebook account and the user can easily log in to the app with the login credentials that are used for Facebook.

Google Hangouts: The Google Hangouts is one of the competitor of the Facebook Messenger App. This app was developed by the Google Company (Schnell et al. 2015). This app also is very popular in the field of social networking. In addition to this the app is very useful. The application is very small in size and provides efficient features to the users for chatting on the web. The people can easily get connected to other people with the help of their Gmail accounts. The only criteria for using this app is that the person has be registered on Google and the person he or she wants to connect to should also be registered on Google. The app can be very easy logged in by someone who has an active Google account, and just need to provide the Google log in credentials while logging in.

Strength and Weakness of the Applications:

Facebook Messenger:

Strengths:

• The Facebook messenger is a very useful app and provides notification to user instantly in a message is received (Jobe 2013).
• The App supports chat bots that the uses can get information from whenever they need.
• In addition to this, the App provides the users the option of free calling and also video chatting.
• The live video feature of the app is very popular among the people.
• In addition to this the application provides the user the facilities of sending media files.
• The new update of the application also allows the users to send documents to each other.

Weakness:

• The main weakness of the application is that the size of the app is bit high for a chat application (Erman et al. 2015).
• In addition to this the application is subjected to update very frequently as features are being added to the application for increasing the popularity of the application.
• In addition to this the size of the application increases with each update of the application.
• The application is generally used for informal conversations, formal conversations are very rare in this application.

Gaps:

• The size of application is very big and hence, there is a scope to optimize the application.
• The data consumed by the app is also too much and hence, this issue also requires efficient addressing.

Google Hangouts:

Strengths:

• The Google hangouts provide a useful platform for the users to have formal as well as informal conversations (Dinh et al. 2013).
• In addition to this, the application allows the users to have the informal conversations as the mails are only used for the formal conversations.
• The application provides a more sophisticated approach to the chatting on web.
• The application provides the facilities of going live on the video chat.
• In addition to this the supplication is very small in size and also very easy user interface.

Weakness:

• The application is designed by keeping in mind solely the formal methods of chatting (Medini et al. 2013).
• In addition to this application is less interactive and do not have a fancy outlook.
• The frequency of the update of the app is very low.

Gaps:

• The looks of the application are not as attractive as the other applications and hence this features requires some up gradation.
• The applications is a primitive type and hence requires to incorporate some additional features in it.

Discussion

The two apps were considered for discussion and were under the scope of analysis by the evaluation framework that is considered in this report (Li et al. 2015). The applications are evaluated on the basis of the popularity of the applications. The popularity is decide by the number of downloads of the applications. In addition to this, the applications were also judged on the basis of their usefulness and also on the size of the application and the user interfaces. Hence, in addition to this the update of the apps and the frequency at which the apps are being updated was very useful for the analysis of the apps. The internal features of the apps were also taken for consideration. The ability of the apps to transfer the files and different kind of media in between the users and the efficiency of the transfers were also taken into account. In addition to this the video calling and the normal calling facilities provided by the apps were also considered.

Recommendation

The following recommendation are to be provided to the apps for their development.

• Firstly, the size of apps need to be very optimal.
• In addition to this, the applications should increase the security constrains so that the user data cannot be obtained by other sources easily.
• In addition to this the company should look to introduce ad free versions of the apps so the users would not be frustrated with the pop ups that come up again and again.
• The application should be modified so that all kinds of extensions are supported by the applications and the users can make transfer their very easily.

Conclusion

For conclusion it can be said that the Facebook Messenger and Google Hangouts have been identified as the applications that are being used for the discussions. In addition to this the strength and weaknesses of the apps have also been provided in the report and also some recommendations have been provided for the improvement of the applications.

References

Bailis, P., Yang, J., Reddi, V.J. and Zhu, Y., 2016. Research for practice: web security and mobile web computing. Communications of the ACM, 60(1), pp.50-53.

Schnell, N., Robaszkiewicz, S., Bevilacqua, F. and Schwarz, D., 2015, January. Collective Sound Checks: Exploring Intertwined Sonic and Social Affordances of Mobile Web Applications. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (pp. 685-690). ACM.

Jobe, W., 2013. Native Apps Vs. Mobile Web Apps. iJIM, 7(4), pp.27-32.

Erman, J., Gopalakrishnan, V., Jana, R. and Ramakrishnan, K.K., 2015. Towards a SPDY’ier mobile web?. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 23(6), pp.2010-2023.

Dinh, H.T., Lee, C., Niyato, D. and Wang, P., 2013. A survey of mobile cloud computing: architecture, applications, and approaches. Wireless communications and mobile computing, 13(18), pp.1587-1611.

Médini, L., Bâcle, F. and Nguyen, H.D.T., 2013, May. DataConf: Enriching conference publications with a mobile mashup application. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web (pp. 477-478). ACM.

Dalmasso, I., Datta, S.K., Bonnet, C. and Nikaein, N., 2013, July. Survey, comparison and evaluation of cross platform mobile application development tools. In Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC), 2013 9th International (pp. 323-328). IEEE.

Li, D., Tran, A.H. and Halfond, W.G., 2015, August. Nyx: a display energy optimizer for mobile web apps. In Proceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering (pp. 958-961). ACM.