Clips, an app by Apple that creates videos

With the release of a new video app called Clips, Apple is inching one step closer to fully engaging in the messaging world.

Clips, which will hit Apple’s App Store in April, let customers take videos and add animated captions and titles, complete with colourful emoji symbols. The app also makes it possible to stitch together multiple video clips and add speech bubbles and filters.

Apple’s new Clips lets users post their video to Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo and more. But if users post them to Apple’s own Messages app, Apple will recommend whom to share it with based on which friends are in the videos and whom the user frequently contacts — the kind of predictive social features Facebook excels at. Apple also says that Messages is the most commonly used app on iOS devices, giving the company potentially up to 800 million users for its latest messaging platform. Facebook has more than 1 billion users for both Messenger, which was split off from the main Facebook service in 2014, and for WhatsApp, which it acquired for $19 billion the same year.

Apple has been steadily matching the features of Facebook’s Messenger. But Apple is also walking a fine line with other messaging players, cooperating with them often as it competes with them. For example, it has opened up the iPhone’s dialer app, long closed off to developers, so that iPhone users could place and receive Skype and WhatsApp calls through the device’s native interface.

Google and Microsoft have been scrambling to get into the game, too. Google has more than a half dozen messaging apps, including Allo, its latest. Microsoft has tried to integrate chat into its Skype app, and Microsoftowned LinkedIn is a popular tool for business notes.

But tech giants obsess over messaging because it is where users are headed, according to analyst firm Gartner. Between 2015 and 2016, the percentage of US and UK smartphone owners who used social media apps dropped from 85 per cent to 83 per cent while messaging apps jumped from 68 per cent to 71 per cent, a trend Gartner expects will continue.