The Best Apps to Stay in Touch with Online Friends

When you move away or start studying abroad, it’s helpful to stay in touch with others to make sure you won’t feel lonely during the first few days. But chat apps are just as great for the everyday stuff too — coordinating when to meet up with close friends, asking your parents what’s for dinner tonight, or checking in on a distant cousin you rarely see in person.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of chat apps available in your app store. Still, some are noticeably better than others depending on what you actually need from them. That’s why we put together this list of the best apps for staying in touch with the people who matter to you. If you’d rather compare them by feature set first, our broader messaging app comparison is worth a look too.

Telegram

Telegram is a cloud-based messenger app that works through your account rather than being tied strictly to your phone number the way some older apps are. It’s available on almost every platform and works just as well on your laptop or desktop as it does on your phone. Through the app, you can send pictures, videos, stickers, and emojis to your contacts, with everything staying in sync across whichever device you happen to open it on.

The interface is clean and easy on the eyes, following a layout familiar to anyone who’s used a standard messaging app like WhatsApp before. When you and another person are online at the same time, you can start a “Secret Chat,” a mode where not even Telegram itself can read the messages exchanged. You can also set your messages to self-destruct after a chosen period of time, giving you an extra layer of privacy when you want it.

Telegram also has a feature called “Telegram Passport,” which lets users securely store digital copies of documents like a passport or driver’s license, and share them with a verified third party when needed, without handing the physical document over. Telegram claims it doesn’t retain access to these files itself, which is worth knowing if document security matters to you.

Snapchat

Starting out as a simple photo-sharing app, Snapchat has since grown into a full social media platform in its own right. At its core, it’s still a multimedia messaging app — when you send or receive a photo, it’s typically only viewable for a few seconds before disappearing. You can also post “stories,” photos or videos visible to your followers for 24 hours before they vanish automatically.

Snapchat’s signature yellow branding gives it a fun, youthful feel, which lines up with exactly the audience it was built for. There are plenty of playful filters to enhance your photos, and some rotate monthly, giving you new ones to try as the seasons change.

A genuine strength of Snapchat is that it doubles as a solid instant messaging app too. Tap on someone you follow, and you can send them a photo, a video, or just a plain text message. Text messages disappear too, unless you specifically pin them within the chat to keep them around.

Through Snapchat, you can stay in touch with friends and family, but also connect with people you’ve never met in person. Plenty of public figures use Snapchat as well, so if there’s someone you admire online, you can often add them directly if you know their username.

Kik Messenger

Kik Messenger is an instant messaging app that works entirely without a phone number, which is exactly why a lot of people prefer using it to talk to strangers online without handing over more personal contact details than necessary. The app lets you send and receive pictures, messages, videos, sketches, stickers, and emojis over any data connection or Wi-Fi network.

Kik automatically trims older messages once a conversation grows past roughly a hundred, which, while there are ways to save specific messages if you want to, generally acts as a quiet, built-in privacy feature. Once a conversation is deleted, the full exchange between you and the other person is gone for good.

With Kik, you can also create group chats and add whoever you’d like into them. That makes it easy to open a shared space for your whole friend group, or, say, coordinate a surprise birthday party for your aunt in a group chat she’s conveniently excluded from.

Like Snapchat, Kik makes it easy to add people you’ve never met before. If you come across someone online who shares their username, you can add them directly and start chatting right away. That makes Kik not just a solid option for staying close to existing friends, but also a genuinely good way to meet new people from all over the world.

Skype

Skype is a telecommunications app offering video chat across a huge range of devices, from your phone to your game console. Beyond video, you can also use it for instant text messages and regular voice calls.

Skype is particularly popular among gamers, since it lets them chat and see each other’s reactions in real time while playing an online game together. Plenty of other people rely on it for job interviews, group project meetings, or a video call with grandma while she’s on holiday in a different country.

When you want to bring more people into the conversation, you can start a group video call where everyone can see and talk to each other at once. Skype is mostly free to use, with low-cost add-ons for calling actual phone numbers internationally, plus a separate “Skype for Business” tier. Regular video calls and instant messaging over Wi-Fi, though, remain completely free.

To get the most out of Skype, it helps to have a decent webcam and microphone. Most modern computers already come with both built in, though quality varies quite a bit between models. If you’re mostly using it on a mobile phone instead, you’re unlikely to run into any real issues either way.

Discord

Discord works somewhat like old-school Internet Relay Chat, organizing conversations into servers and channels rather than one flat inbox. You get to pick your own username without worrying about it already being taken, since Discord pairs it with a unique identifier behind the scenes.

Discord has been around since 2015, though it really took off in popularity around 2018 and 2019. Plenty of niche websites and Reddit communities run their own dedicated Discord server where people can drop into an ongoing conversation at any time. That makes it a genuinely great way to connect with people from all over the world who happen to share your specific interests.

The platform was originally built with gamers in mind, since it keeps messaging delay to a minimum even during a busy voice call. That said, plenty of non-gamers use it too, partly because it tends to fly under the radar of strict parents or teachers who might recognize more mainstream apps. Like Kik, it also offers a fair amount of built-in anonymity, letting people build out an alter ego persona if they’d rather not use their real identity.

Instagram

While this isn’t strictly a messaging app, Instagram is still a great way to stay updated on what your friends are up to. The platform lets people post photos of themselves or their interests, along with a caption, and also supports “stories” similar to Snapchat’s, showing what someone’s currently up to for a limited time.

Instagram is popular with teens and adults alike, largely because it’s so easy to pick up and use. You and your friends can follow each other, but you can just as easily follow public figures or complete strangers whose content you enjoy. If you’d rather keep things private, you can lock your account so only approved followers can see your posts, and anyone wanting to follow you first has to send a request.

It’s worth remembering that social apps like Instagram often only show a curated, sunnier version of someone’s actual life. So while your friends keep posting cheerful vacation photos, their day-to-day reality likely isn’t sunshine and rainbows all the time either. If you find yourself feeling worse after scrolling through your feed, it’s worth setting a daily time limit on the app for the sake of your own mental health.

Picking the right one for the friendship

With this many good options, it’s worth thinking about the specific friendship rather than trying to find one “best” app for everyone. A close friend you talk to daily might be better suited to something fast and casual like Snapchat or Kik, while a long-distance grandparent might actually prefer the simplicity of a Skype video call over navigating a new app’s interface. There’s no rule saying you need to consolidate every relationship onto a single platform — using a couple of different apps for different people is completely normal, and often works better than forcing everyone onto the same one.

Set a realistic rhythm, not a perfect one

Trying to keep up daily contact with every friend across every app quickly turns into a source of guilt rather than connection. It’s more sustainable to settle into a rhythm that actually fits the friendship — a weekly check-in with one friend, a monthly deep-dive call with another, a running meme exchange with a group chat that doesn’t need a reply every time. If a friendship already feels like it’s drifting, our guide on what to do when a friendship is slipping away has more targeted advice. Consistency at a realistic pace tends to keep friendships alive far longer than an intense burst of daily messages that inevitably fizzles out after a few weeks.

Mix async and live communication

Not every conversation needs to happen in real time, and leaning entirely on one style tends to wear thin. Async messages — a voice note, a photo with a caption, a long text you write whenever you have a spare moment — let you stay in touch around a busy schedule without needing to coordinate timing. Live calls, on the other hand, capture tone and spontaneity that text can’t. The friendships that tend to last longest usually blend both, rather than relying on just one mode of contact.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are plenty of solid ways to stay in touch with your friends online. All of these apps are available right on your phone, letting you use them whenever it suits you. And while you might see some friends daily in person, these same apps are just as valuable for keeping a long-distance friend or family member genuinely close, no matter how many miles are actually between you.