There're obviously a lot of ways to measure this, so I'm just going to do a quick estimate.
I'm comparing downloads and recommendations for each app on the Google Play store.
There's a couple caveats.
1. The Google Play store doesn't separate downloads by region. Out of the above apps, I know that WhatsApp is disproportionately more popular in India and WeChat's the same in China.
2. From experience, I know a lot of people chat with Facebook and Google Hangouts (GChat) on their computers, especially since Hangouts is built into Gmail. In fact, for new Android devices, text messages to other Android users are send through Hangouts by default. These numbers don't reflect those users.
3. I included several apps that are traditional one-to-one chat clients. The important thing to consider is that social networks and chat clients are blurring together. Does a Facebook wall post count as a chat? Does a comment on a wall post count as a chat?
4. The apps that have higher than 50% recommendation rate make me suspicious. Companies are known to buy ratings. Google's obvious pulling some shenanigans with 155% of downloads upvoting the app. But then again, they own the store...
4. These numbers have no insight into which services are more actively used. Do people send more messages per day on WhatsApp or Hangouts? No idea.
5. Somewhere on that list should be SMS / text message. Maybe even in 1st place.
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Is this a comprehensive study? Nope. There's too much data out there to consider. This is a very quick and dirty estimate.
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As always, if you have the courage and patience to translate this into Chinese, then go for it!
