Steam has mainly been a gaming marketplace for PC games over the years, but Valve appears to be doubling down on the platform’s social aspects with its newly launched Steam Chat messaging app for Android and iOS.

A few years ago, I went on a business trip to Scotland with journalists from other parts of the world. On the trip, we used WhatsApp to stay connected, which encouraged the participants to stay in touch via WhatsApp as well, especially in the form of group chats.

Google announced, in late 2017, that it was planning to shutter Allo, its messaging service that never quite resonated with users. Today is the day when Allo bites the dust.

If you've been relying on Allo, it's time to swing your Plan B into operation and to download your chat history.

Between Slack, WhatsApp!, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Hangouts and Telegram, I've been known to miss a message or two as I suffer from notification fatigue and forget to go back to an app. Volt aims to end that pain by delivering a single messaging platform that brings a bunch of different messaging systems to a single screen on Mac, Windows and Linux systems.

Google has officially adopted the next-gen “RCS” text messaging protocol, which doesn’t really matter right now if you don’t use its Google Fi service. However, the company is also pushing every single carrier to move to RCS from SMS — a much-needed upgrade — and that will have a significant impact on your texting, selfie-sending, and GIF-blasting going forward.

iPhone users have it easy. iMessage comes preinstalled, and it achieves more than even the best messaging apps on Android. iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, it supports SMS and it’s packed with features that range from gimmicky (Animoji) to can’t-live-without-it useful (Memoji).

The experience of one iPhone user messaging another is seamless, secure, and convenient. The same can’t be said for Android users.

It was just a few days ago that I said Google's messaging strategy was a mess. In a statement published by Google overnight, the company has put Allo, the messaging platform they launched just a couple of years ago, on the chopping block declaring it will stop working next March. It's yet another software thought balloon floated by Google and then pricked into oblivion.

Google's history with messaging services has been a mess. And just when it seemed it was kind of getting its act together, the search giant has once again invited Mr Cock-Up to visit and make life more confusing for users. Hangouts for consumers is disappearing and there doesn't seem to be a clear plan for what's next. It's like the company didn't learn anything from the time it killed Google Reader.

How many people out there are still using AOL Mail? I assumed it was all of three people, but apparently there’s still a considerable number of you clinging to your aol.com accounts.

Do you hope AOL will make a grand resurgence one day? Are you nostalgic for the sounds of a dial-up modem? Do you hate Gmail? You can move providers; it’ll be OK.

If you have a popular name combination, or just get a lot of email at work, you're bound to get an email that wasn't intended for you. You could ignore it, sure, but there are better ways to handle it.

AIM, a pioneer in the world of online messaging, is shutting down after 20 years. The service will officially shutter on December 15, with no plans for an official replacement from Oath, the Verizon-owned company that includes both America Online and Yahoo.

If you weren't swayed to incinerate your smart devices and encourage your family to go full Ron Swanson after recent reports on potential child-spying Disney apps, a damning examination of the wildly-popular Kik Messenger app may convince you to ready the blowtorch.

In honour of Skype's newest update, the video chat and messaging app is dropping support for a variety of platforms.

Team messaging application Slack is upping the ante in the battle of the collaboration platforms. With Slack, HipChat and Microsoft Teams all battling it out to master the collaboration game, Slack has added the ability to time limit guest access to chats and adding some extra information so you know more about guests.

A few months ago, Facebook announced its plans to start showing ads in Messenger. Now, we have a glimpse at what they will look like. They're huge and obnoxious. The moral of the story: Never message brands.

Android/iOS: It's way easier to send a quick message to someone than write a long email. Why can't email be like messaging? Hop thinks it can, turning your emails into chat-style conversations you can reply to quickly.

WhatsApp is one of the most popular private messaging apps out there, so it's a little surprising it didn't have support for two-step authentication. Now, the beta version of the app has added the feature so, like always, turn it on now.

Earlier this year, Facebook announced it was building bots that would let companies chat with you in Messenger. Now, the company has announced sponsored messages. They're like ads, but for your chat app.

The end-to-end message encryption Facebook promised to Messenger users back in July has finally finished rolling out to everyone. Here's how to enable it.