When comparing Messenger vs invi, the Slant community recommends invi for most people. In the question“What are the best SMS apps for Android?” invi is ranked 9th while Messenger is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose invi is:
invi automatically detects if you're talking to someone who's on invi, and switches between SMS and IM automatically to accommodate. That way, you get fully-featured chats when you're talking to someone who has invi, but you also get a beautiful, seamless experience when simply sending SMS messages.
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 Automatically switches between SMS and IM
invi automatically detects if you're talking to someone who's on invi, and switches between SMS and IM automatically to accommodate. That way, you get fully-featured chats when you're talking to someone who has invi, but you also get a beautiful, seamless experience when simply sending SMS messages.
Pro Share and consume rich media without leaving the app
The killer feature of invi is the ability to consume media in the app. For example if someone sends you a link to a Youtube video invi automatically turns it into a playable widget.
Not only can you view the media in the app, but you can also discuss the videos, photos etc while they are playing.
Pro Beautiful interface
The apps design has a level of care and detail put into it that is rare on Android apps. The home screen is not only beautiful, but shows useful information such as the last message sent, and the status of the person.
The messaging interface itself is very clean and useful. As well as the conversation history it tells you if the recipient has read your last message, is currently reading the conversation or is replying. This makes conversations in invi very fluid as you always know the status of the recipient.
Pro Makes it easy and fun to share stuff
invi makes sharing easy and fun - great to enrich conversations with stuff like YouTube clips, photos, games, web articles etc.
Pro Uses phone numbers for contacts
Invi uses your contacts phone numbers, not a app specific username or email address. This has pros and cons. On the upside it's very simple to get started as it automatically adds all your contacts who have invi installed, and if you text someone who doesn't have invi it will simply go to their normal inbox. This makes it very easy to integrate invi into your existing workflow.
On the downside you cannot chat to someone if you don't have their number (gchat friends for example).
Pro Certain apps can be used in split screen
A collection of apps can be used in split screen view with the messenger. These are apps designed or ported specifically for invi. Some of the apps included allow browsing sites like reddit, 9gag, buzzfeed or playing games like 2048 while using the app.
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 No group chat
Con You can only search contacts and not messages
Con Early in development
This app still has some rough edges and missing features (like group chat).
Con Registration difficult for those without a phone #
For those that do not want to share their phone number or just do not have one to share, registration for invi can not be done. This means the app cannot be registered on a tablet or media device (like an iPOD touch) unless there is a number to give, of which neither of those devices when used by themselves have.
Con Android only
The many features cannot be used with people who aren't on Android, and you cannot login from the web.