Amazon.com Inc. wants a slice of the consumer messaging market, at least according to a report published late last week.

The e-commerce and cloud computing giant apparently is developing an app that would take on services provided by Facebook Inc., Apple Inc. and Google Inc. The claim comes from AFTV News, which got its hands on slides that describe the proposed service, currently called “Anytime,” that are being used by the company to survey customers on which features they find most important in a messaging app.

According to the screenshots, the Anytime app could include support for messaging, voice, video calls and photo sharing. Users also could apply filters to photos and videos, send stickers and gifs to other users and play games – a set of features that basically just described Facebook Messenger among other messaging apps. Perhaps defining it as somewhat different to standard messaging service fare, there is also a mention of the app supporting group video chats, something that has been possible on services such as Google Inc.’s Allo and Microsoft Corp.’s Skype messaging service but not always available on more popular messaging platforms.

Other features appear to be login support using an Amazon account versus the use of a phone number as is the case with Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging application, support for encryption and the ability to chat with businesses, make reservations and buy goods from Amazon.

It’s difficult to see how Amazon could carve out messaging market share in an already congested and highly competitive market. Google every couple of years comes out with a new messaging or social networking product that fails to make an impact on the market. If that tech giant can’t make a dent, it’s even less clear how Amazon thinks it can. The biggest challenge is that users already have friends on existing services and may be unwilling to switch as a result.

But there is one new example of users willing to abandon a service for a better choice, and that’s with Snapchat users switching to Instagram. In the case of Snap Inc.’s recent decline, there are unique factors with its loss of users. The biggest is that Instagram simply copied all of its most popular features and then implemented them in a superior fashion. But Instagram also had an existing user base and promotional links with its parent company Facebook as well, which it could use to grow the service.

By contrast, Amazon has next to zero messaging customers coming into a new app aside from Amazon Echo users. So no matter how good the app may be, the challenge is to sign up enough users to achieve a tipping point at which the app itself will grow organically. For any company, that’s a hard ask.

Image: Amazon/AFTV News