Jongla Social Messenger bridges the gap between instant messaging and social networks
Jongla adds a social discovery layer and reactions to its redesigned messaging app
Name:
Jongla for Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Firefox OS
Quick pitch:
Jongla today announced the release of Social Messenger – its most significant feature upgrade yet. With new social discovery tools, a redesigned UI and brand upgrade, Jongla aims to make instant messaging more social and more fun for people around the world.
Key points:
- ● People – built-in community helps users to discover interesting new people nearby
- ● Reactions – a new way to express friendship and an interest in meeting new people
- ● Rebranding – new app icon, themes, redesigned UI and user profiles
- ● Lite – world’s lightest messenger helps people to save money and data
London, UK, June 22nd, 2016 – Jongla, the Finnish instant messaging pioneer, has today announced the release of Jongla Social Messenger, a new iteration of its popular cross-platform messaging app. With new 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.
For more information about Jongla, please visit www.jongla.com/newsroom.
ENDS
Notes to editors
*Based on a study carried out by Jongla with Android SDK command line tools and Linux Kernel, June 7th, 2016
**Android Application Package sizes in Google Play Store, May 17th, 2016
About Jongla
Jongla is an innovative Finnish-based company, specialising in operator-, device- and platform-independent instant messaging. Established in 2009, Jongla was founded by entrepreneur Arto Boman. The company is owned by a group of private investors and management.
To date, Jongla has received a total of €11M in funding and been selected as a winner of Red Herring’s Top 100 Global Award 2013 – a prestigious list honouring the most promising private technology ventures from around the world.
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Dan Walsh
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