Fring and Skype have badly fallen out after 4 years of tolerating one another, as the Israeli/US based fring has suddenly taken off with the recent introduction of fring two way video calling apps.
Fring came to fame by putting all mobile friends in one basket, and creating a single conversations app way back in 2006, and now many handset vendors have copied this approach, with perhaps the first being Motorola when it introduced its first Android phones.
Representatives from fring were almost too angry to speak when we called them, constant referring to the way Skype has portrayed itself as an open communications company, but has clearly come down hard on fring, claiming that it has harmed its image, and broken rules of the uses of key APIs, and been anything but open.
While fring never gives out its actual user numbers, it has been on a bit of a roll recently since its November introduction of Symbian 2 way video calling, across networks and devices. Since then it has added an Android version and only last week got approval to go ahead with the same app on the iPhone 4.0, despite Apple having its own Face Time two way video application.
A spokesman told us, ‘Since Thursday at 9:46 the surge in our traffic has been incredible and we have had to scale back support for some third party apps. We’ve added server farms and more server farms.’ He also told us that fring had suddenly overtaken Skype on the iPhone app store in daily downloads, and left us to assume that this was a key ingredient in Skype decision to request that fring no longer connected to Skype customers.
But neither side would address the substantive issue between the two companies, only to say that ‘legal threats’ had been made by Skype calling to block connectivity between the two systems. Skype on the other hand has made it widely known that it thought it was in a dialog with fring, when suddenly connectivity was switched off. Take your pick who you believe.
Fring now says that over 50% of its traffic was ‘fring to fring’ and that it supports interconnectivity with MSN Messenger, ICQ, Google Talk, Twitter, AIM and Yahoo! and the handset’s regular contact list. We would guess that Skype represents perhaps 3% to 5% of its traffic. We know that prior to the launch of the video calling application fring was adding 500,000 new users a month, and that it has accelerated substantially since then and is in the tens of millions.
Fring has had interconnectivity with Skype since it launched in 2006 and is now inviting fringsters everywhere to tell their friends to dump Skype and load up fring instead or as well. Both of them are free downloads. Fring makes its money out of advertising throughout the entire fring experience, whether it is IM, text or video calling.
“We are disappointed that Skype, who once championed the cause of openness, is now attempting to muzzle competition, even to the detriment of its own users” said Avi Shechter, fring’s Co-Founder and CEO “We apologize to our users for the impact of Skype’s bullying and we will be happy to reconnect with Skype once Skype reverses their decision.”