Viber has long been a good choice for users looking to fulfill both VoIP and instant messaging needs from a single app. Traditionally, the purple-hued app has been best at neither function, but over the years has slowly chipped away at incumbent Skype to be a good second choice. It now boasts over 200 million users, and is growing at a pretty good clip; it had 175 million in February.
With version 4.0, Viber is positioning itself as the everything app, introducing a Sticker Market for those desirous of expressing themselves uniquely (and willing to spend to do so), a push-to-talk function that lets users speak in real time within chat rooms, and a tablet interface for Android users.
At the same time, Viber has expanded its potential messaging pool, allowing 100 members to chat within the same room.
If you’re keeping track, Viber is now encroaching not only on social networks like Path, but messaging apps like Kik and WhatsApp, group messaging services like GroupMe and, to some extent, Yammer, and existing VoIP companies like Skype. It purports to do it all, and uses your phone number to connect everything together (you can be logged in from multiple devices).
There are a few issues with the initial release of Viber 4.0: it crashes immediately upon opening on my iPhone 5s, but let’s hope a hotfix release is on its way.
Viber is also available for Windows Phone, legacy BlackBerry devices, and has recently added desktop apps for OS X and Windows, so it makes a pretty good cross-platform instant messaging app, too.
[source]Google Play, App Store[/source]
