PhonOn brings voice chat to Facebook

I love the new push to talk feature on WhatsApp. Yes, I was also the part of the smartphone-using community which thought it was lame when WeChat and Line first introduced it. Now, as long as you’ve have privacy, I really don’t feel like typing on WhatsApp anymore. Also, recording sounds and quickly sending it to a recipient opens up a world of possibilities with respect to communications.

Speaking of communications, about a billion of us world citizens probably use Facebook as a primary means of IM. Shouldn’t this also have a voice chat capability? Well, there’s an app for that. Chennai-based Demach has an app, PhonOn, which allows you to send voice messages to your Facebook friends. When you’re not doing so, the app also acts as Facebook client, where you can browse the top stories on your news feed as well as have chats over text and voice with your friends.

What is it like?

The app is fairly simple to get acquainted with. You log in using your Facebook credentials and you create yourself a user profile on PhonOn. Honestly, it has a very seamless first-time login process. Within 15 odd seconds, I was presented with a screen of my Facebook contacts, prioritized on the basis of PhoneOn users first, and then the rest, laid out alphabetically.Opposite to each contact is a mic button, which you can touch to record your message with and once you release the button, it sends the message. If your friend on Facebook isn’t a PhoneOn users, then a link with your message is sent to them on their Facebook chat window, from where they can access the message. Co-founder Srikrishna Ganesan shared that there’s some significant engineering that has gone into the audio compression part of the app, making sure that it works on low bandwidths as well. And true to that, the app works just fine on 2G networks as well. Only glitches it faced was while loading the contact lists.

There are two other tabs on the top of the screen on either side of this contact tab. The one on its left is a limited Facebook newsfeed, where you can view status updates and respond to them via text or by voice. However, you can’t like or see other comments on the posts. It does however have a cute birthday reminder on the top right corner of the app.The tab on the left is quite interesting, as it is a full fledged chat client, where you can have conversations using text and voice. The chat client on PhonOn even has stickers. You can send attachments and even have group chats. I used the app quite extensively and each of its functions does what it says, and I didn’t experience a single force-close of the app on Android. In all, it’s a pretty robust app.

However, there’s a slight problem

And it doesn’t have to do with the product. Yes, the design and layout of the app could be more compliant with the platform design standards, but it is an app that works and it works very well. The problem is that it feels like two full apps in one app - a news reader as well as a chat client. I really think the voice messaging part of the app is brilliant, but PhonOn is so much more and that. There isn’t a singular standout feature in this app that would make me come back to it. For Facebook feeds, I’d go to the Facebook app itself and for the voice part, most of the guys on my Facebook friend list are anyways on Whatsapp. There are benefits with PhonOn; for example, the bandwidth used for voice is less than other alternatives, without compromising too much on the quality of the sound, but it isn’t enough of an incentive for me to become a regular user of the app.Also, the only possible revenue source from this app is through sticker sales, which again, is a foreign thing and it isn’t known to work in India.

However...I still think PhonOn is a brilliant app and with enough of my friends on it, I might not mind using it a little more often. It needs to be marketed better. Also, the app can have a slight design makeover.

But to me, there is a lot of engineering that has gone into this app, which in itself can be of interest to people in the market. Co-founder, Srikrishna has shared plans that they are executing along these lines, but that, is for another day.

For now, download PhonOn and tell us what you think