ChatON

» see chaton.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i had a samsung galaxy somewhere in the 2012 to 2014 window. chaton was already on the dock when the phone booted, sitting next to the dialer with a green speech-bubble icon. samsung had unveiled it at ifa berlin in september 2011 and shipped the apps a month later on october 14, in 62 languages. the pitch was a free cross-platform messenger that did everything whatsapp did, plus stickers and voice calls and a web version (or so the press materials said).

this part most of us in turkey watched from the side. anyway, msn was already on its way out, whatsapp had taken over the contacts list, and the people i talked to were not going to install yet another messenger because their phone manufacturer had bundled it (close enough). i opened chaton maybe twice. the contact list was empty. nobody i knew had agreed to chat through samsung. i closed the app and never opened it again.

samsung claimed over 100 million users at peak, with growth heavy in india and south korea. the engagement story was much worse. flurry's analytics in late '14 reported chaton users were spending about six seconds per month inside the app, compared with eleven hours on facebook and an hour on instagram. the registered base was inflated by every galaxy device autocreating an account on first boot. the active base was almost nothing.

on december 18 2014 samsung quietly announced the shutdown. the service ended in most countries on march 31 '15, the us app stayed online a few months longer for an account export window before being retired the same year. samsung's official line was that it would refocus on health and mobile commerce instead. the dock icon disappeared from the next round of galaxy phones with no replacement.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

chaton looked like every other messenger of the era, a contact list down the left, a chat pane on the right, animated stickers samsung called anicons. group chats topped out at around 100 members. you could send voice notes, attach photos, share location. the voice-call feature came later in '12, video-call after that. the web version let you sync to a desktop browser, which is the kind of feature whatsapp would not ship until '15.

the platform support list was unusually wide for a samsung product. anyway, android and bada were the priorities since samsung shipped both. ios, blackberry, windows phone, windows mobile, and a web client filled out the rest (close enough). most of those clients were thin wrappers around the same backend. the bada version was the only one most non-samsung users ever saw, since bada phones came with chaton as the only messenger choice.

~ the fall ~

the engagement problem was visible by mid '13. for some reason, the global ranking lists from app annie and similac put chaton outside the top ten messengers in every major country except south korea, where kakaotalk owned the category anyway. india was where samsung had the most galaxy market share in absolute terms, but indian users were already moving to whatsapp by the end of '13. the chaton registered base in india was huge on paper and used almost nowhere in practice.

internal samsung pressure from the mobile commerce side was reportedly the trigger. the messaging team was reorganized in mid '14 to consolidate under samsung pay and samsung health, both of which had clearer revenue stories than a free messenger competing with whatsapp on its home turf. by november the writing was on the wall. the december shutdown notice followed the usual schedule. accounts could be exported, chat history could be downloaded for a window.

~ what got buried with it ~

chaton was the largest example of a phone-maker trying to own the messaging layer through preload alone. either way, htc had a similar bet with htc sense's friend stream, lg had me, sony had timescape. all of them lost to whatsapp the same way. preload installs do not create habits. the contact list is what creates habits. chaton's contact list was empty for almost every user who booted a galaxy s3 in 2012 and never opened the app twice.

samsung kept the messaging space empty on galaxy phones for a few years after chaton died (or so it seemed). by then, the rcs era began with google's android messages as the default and samsung shipped its own samsung messages alongside, which is the post-chaton continuation if there is one. the chaton brand was buried with no ceremony. the user count had been a vanity number from the start.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »