When comparing Messenger vs Mirage, the Slant community recommends Messenger for most people. In the question“What are the best messaging apps for Android?” Messenger is ranked 21st while Mirage is ranked 39th. 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 Includes filters
It's possible to change the look of images and videos via filters.
Pro Groups
It's possible to send messages to multiple people at once. Either by setting up a group or by selecting a bunch of people individually. Groups can also be muted if they get too noisy.
Pro Messages self-destruct after they've been viewed
Once a message has been viewed, it gets deleted from Snapchat's servers. Thus, unless a person chooses to save the message manually (a notification will be sent if a user decides to take a screenshot), there will be no trace of it left. It enables a bit more consequence-free, in-the-moment kind of communication to occur.
Pro Generates a contact list
Once the account setup process is complete, Mirage generates a list of people from your contacts that you are most likely interested in sending messages via Mirage.
Pro Interface designed for getting things done quickly
Tap a contact to take a picture, tap and hold a contact to record video. Tapping the screen will allow you to add text to photos and videos just taken. Swiping the screen changes what camera is used. Swiping from the side allows sending text and voice messages. Voice messages are recorded the same way videos are by tapping and holding on a contact just from a different view.
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 Buggy
Messages get lost users have trouble getting their codes to log in and has trouble actually finding the users contacts.