Instant messaging apps are an increasingly crowded market and despite your best efforts to keep it simple using a single platform, sometime you can’t avoid keeping to or three around to keep in touch with different people. In any given day I get hundreds of notifications from HipChat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Skype and my business’ Facebook Page.
While most of these clients are mobile-first nowadays, thankfully for my sake all offer some form of desktop counterpart — either a full blown native client of a web based one — so I can reply faster and more comfortably using an actual keyboard. That doesn’t make switching between different app windows and browser tabs throughout the day any less annoying.
If this sounds familiar there are a handful of all in one messaging clients that can save you the trouble by keeping all your chats under one roof, and best of all they are cross platform. The concept isn’t new — Trillian anyone? — but updated for today’s mobile messaging world.