When comparing Messenger vs Hike, the Slant community recommends Messenger for most people. In the question“What are the best messaging apps for Android?” Messenger is ranked 21st while Hike is ranked 25th. The most important reason people chose Messenger is:
Allows communicating with anyone who's a friend on Facebook.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Uses Facebook friends to create a contacts list
Allows communicating with anyone who's a friend on Facebook.
Pro Read receipts
Can see who has seen each message in group messages.
Pro Easy to share posts from Facebook
Integration with Facebook makes it easy to share any interesting posts from the Facebook timeline.
Pro Great UI
User interface of the application is clean, intuitive and easy to overview.
Pro Lots of great features
It contains a wallet for money transfer, news update & sports update feature.
Pro Without data media sharing option within 100m
Pro Great sticker system
A very fast sticker suggestion based on key words typed. This helps to send relevant stickers quickly. Also when we press upon a sticker it opens a quick reply sticker option.
Pro Night-mode
Hike has an app theme & auto night mode(8pm-6am) inside to reduce strain on eye while texting at night.
Pro Has a timeline
It has a timeline(photo + text), which is similar to BBM.
Pro Photo editing feature
It has a selfie edit feature like Instagram, helps with editing selfies for profile photos & photo statuses.
Cons
Con Lack of privacy
Messenger is owned by Facebook. Based on their privacy policy, this means that any information you provide (including messages sent) are used by Facebook to profile you and sell access to your data to advertisers.
Con Lack of end-to-end encryption
Secret (end-to-end encrypted) chats are only supported in one-to-one messages, and are not enabled by default, and the encryption has not been verified independently.
Con Security of user information
First of all, this is closed source software. It also lacks-end-to-end encryption. In today's time, irrespective of every other feature, encryption is the most important one. Because without it, rest of the features become risky to use and thus meaningless.