Every day we start by opening our favorite messenger. Some have two or even three. Somewhere news, in another place of the group, at the beginning we communicate with relatives or colleagues. This is the main social application of the 21st century, especially in the last three years.
As the functionality and technical requirements for messengers expand. We are accustomed to immediacy – quickly extracting access to content. And here services have different levels of sophistication depending on specific tasks.
we decided to look what messenger is the fastest today for data. We checked sending and uploading photos, videos and just files, including large ones. And, no matter how trite it may sound, I did not expect such results.
What messengers and how we test
The tests were carried out on two iphone 13 pro with iOS 16.3 on board, using Wi-Fi with speed 100 megabits in sec.
We consider this a good “equalizer”, given the wide spread of Internet speeds across the country.
We gave up almost immediately. The reason is simple: the results are too unstable and very often rest not on the capabilities of the servers or the features of the messenger, but on the speed and quality of the signal exported by the operator.
Who are we testing:
▸ Telegram
▸ VK Messenger
▸ Viber
▸ iMessage
In the case of Telegram, we have disabled the subscription Premium. But it is still infected outside the “competition” for similar iPhone models and the Internet. With amazing file upload or download speeds, it didn’t show up at all. At this point, we will not specify here, but personally, who regularly deducts money to Durov every month, this moment was a little embarrassing (to put it mildly).
How is speed measured? stopwatch. To achieve the speed of sending, we start a stopwatch on a nearby laptop in the search areas “Send” in the messenger and until the file is found by the interlocutor in the chat. The download speed was measured in a similar way, after disabling all autoload functions in messengers.
1. Sending and uploading photos
Conditions: HEIF photo taken with iPhone 13 Pro. It weighs 3 MB.
Sending a photo:
▪ Telegram: 1.9 seconds
▪ whatsapp: 1.1 seconds
▪ VK Messenger: 0.7 seconds
▪ Viber: 6.5 seconds
▪ iMessage: 13 seconds
Photo upload:
▪ Telegram: 1.4 seconds
▪ whatsapp: 1 second
▪ VK Messenger: 1 second
▪ Viber: 4 seconds
▪ iMessage: 5 second
Result: was the fastest in shipping VK Messengerfast speed on arrival – whatsapp And VK Messenger.
An interesting point. All messengers compress the quality of sent images. The worst came out in WhatsApp and Viber, the best in VK Messenger and iMessage.
2. Sending and downloading videos
Conditions: HEVC video shot on iPhone 13 Pro, which weighs 103 MB.
Sending a 100 MB video:
Telegram: 15 seconds
whatsapp: 3.5 seconds
VK Messenger: 5.8 seconds
Viber: 14 seconds
iMessage: 47 seconds
Video download 100 MB:
Telegram: 32 seconds
whatsapp: 22 seconds
VK Messenger: 15 seconds
Viber: 18 seconds
iMessage:-
Result: was the fastest when sending whatsappand at the meeting VK Messenger. We could not check the download speed of iMessage, since the messenger appeared as a video file in the correspondence in an already downloaded form.
Here we need to make a very important remark. All messengers somehow compress the sent video files. Viber does it most of all: from 100 megabytes it decreased to 1.9 megabytes, for some reason the video was severely cut off and became dangerously “soapy”. The result, to be honest, I wanted to remove from a distance.
Next comes WhatsApp – 100 megabytes of videos have been compressed to just 3.5 megabytes. The quality has become very poor, suitable only for cursory viewing.
The third was iMessage with 5.3 megabytes instead of 100 megabytes. The quality is good, but there are no video defects.
The fourth place in terms of compression is in Telegram. The file has grown to 8.9 megabytes. The quality is also strong. It’s better than iMessage, but not as strong as WhatsApp. Basically, it looks good. Finally, VK Messenger shook the video the least, up to 32 megabytes. The quality looks indistinguishable from the original on your color.
3. Sending and downloading small files
Conditions: the file weighs 200 MB.
Sending a 200 MB file:
Telegram: 62 seconds
whatsapp: 50 seconds
VK Messenger: 27 seconds
Viber: 217 seconds
iMessage:-
File download 200 MB:
Telegram: 59 seconds
whatsapp: 46 seconds
VK Messenger: 26 seconds
Viber: 31 seconds
iMessage:-
Result: both in sending and in receiving the fastest was VK Messenger. Pay attention to the more than twofold advantage over Telegram.
iMessage didn’t send a 200MB file directly via messenger. From a technical point of view, we did not test the alternative to sending via iCloud Drive, as this is a completely different story.
4. Sending and downloading large files
Conditions: file is important 3.7 GB.
Sending a 3.7 GB file:
Telegram*: 20 minutes and 41 seconds
whatsapp:-
VK Messenger: 9 minutes
Viber:-
iMessage:-
File download 3.7 GB:
Telegram: 17 minutes and 12 seconds
whatsapp:-
VK Messenger: 8 minutes and 29 seconds
Viber:-
iMessage:-
Result: of only two messengers that support sending files over 2 GB, the fastest was Messenger VK. Moreover, the difference is again twofold, as in the observations of the test.
WhatsApp does not allow downloads larger than 2 GB, while Viber does not allow 200 MB. Most recently, VK Messenger began to support sending files important up to 4 GB, so far only in the client for computers. So we tested sending with it, at the same Internet speed.
* Telegram provides access to more than 2 GB of files for everyone who is not subscribed to Telegram Premium. We tried subscription.
5. Results. Which messenger is faster?
In tests of eight, the winner is obvious. VK Messenger almost always the most frequent access to data with the least loss. Personally, I did not expect this. Looking back, the advantage of VKontakte over other messengers was predictable: local servers make it possible to receive information and transfer speed to users’ devices much faster.
I always used to think that Telegram is expanding this area faster. But the numbers speak for prom…
Source: Iphones RU
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
