This article reviews FlexiSPY and Mobistealth’s ability to monitor Yahoo! Messenger (YM) IM logs from your iPhone target phone. To understand our testing methods, click here.
Parent company AOL hasn’t released any statistics on YM’s account base or usage. However as one of the original IM platforms, Yahoo! Messenger has been around since 1998. Many old skool netizens still use their original accounts, with most of their contacts still on it. Yahoo! was one of the first popular search engines and free email services, and boosted YM’s popularity by integrating it into the free Yahoo! email service. Because of this anyone with a Yahoo! email account already has a Yahoo! Messenger account.
But it’s not only older people that use YM. By integrating Yahoo Search, Email, News, Games, Dating and even the popular photo sharing site Flickr all under a single account and home page login, Yahoo has remained popular with both IM and email users of all ages.
Yahoo! Messenger Options
Yahoo! Messenger for iPhone users communicate by text, emoticons and photo sharing, as well as streaming video and voice calls.
There are 7 basic types of chat information that is sent by Yahoo Messenger for iPhone:
- Contact Name
- Contact Photo
- Text chat
- Emoticons
- Photo sharing
- Video call
- Audio call
We use this information in testing both FlexiSPY and its competitors. In the screenshot Fig. 1 you can see a typical screen from YM as it appears on iPhone.
The image here shows both text and images sent and received.
How does Mobistealth capture Yahoo! Messenger?
Mobistealth does not monitor Yahoo! Messenger for iPhone or Android, despite misleading information on the Mobistealth web site.
After looking at their web site, you could be forgiven for thinking Mobistealth monitors Yahoo! Messenger on a mobile phone, but it isn’t true.
Mobistealth’s page on Yahoo chat logging shows pictures of mobile phones running YM, and even a diagram of this being sent to the Mobistealth server. The page also claims to “get the complete logs of all Yahoo! Messenger Chats on the phone.”
However this is a form of misinformation. The top of the page brings little attention to the words “Computer Only,” while the bottom of the page has only a “Windows PC” icon highlighted for availability. This is further confirmed where the iPhone, Android and Blackberry specific feature pages do not list Yahoo! Messenger at all.
Mobistealth has published misleading information that suggests the product will monitor Yahoo! Messenger on a mobile phone, but make no mistake about it – Mobistealth does not offer Yahoo! Messenger chat logging on any mobile phone model.
Mobistealth only claims to monitor WhatsApp for iPhone, not Yahoo! Messenger or any other mobile IM apps. We cover how well Mobistealth captures WhatsApp in a separate review from this series.
How does FlexiSPY capture Yahoo! Messenger?
FlexiSPY accurately captured 4 out of 7 types of YM communications, including all YM text chat logs plus photos sent between our target iPhone user and multiple contacts, which were also identified by contact names and profile pictures.
Logs are displayed in the FlexiSPY dashboard similar to YM on the phone itself, with alternating contacts on each side in an easy to follow format. Multiple contacts can easily be viewed and selected from a list to the side of the main log screen.
FlexiSPY is the only cell phone monitoring and spyphone software to capture Yahoo! Messenger logs on iPhone – this makes FlexiSPY the only choice for YM text and photo monitoring of iPhone target phones.
Only FlexiSPY monitors YM logs on iPhone – no other mobile monitoring software offers it – including Mobistealth.
FlexiSPY vs Mobistealth – Who Captures More Yahoo! Messenger?
Mobistealth does not offer any Yahoo! Messenger monitoring for iPhone. Although Mobistealth publishes misleading information about YM on their web site, in truth Mobistealth only offers YM monitoring for Windows PC. Therefore you can’t capture any YM communications from an iPhone target using Mobistealth.
Although FlexiSPY doesn’t yet capture YM’s live audio and video calls, it did successfully capture all YM text messages and photos, plus contact names and profile pictures (emoticons presented in ASCII equivalents). This information is displayed with each contact on alternating sides in an easy to follow format (See Fig. 3). FlexiSPY sends these logs to your personal online archive for review at any time, inside your FlexiSPY account.
FlexiSPY offers more tracking and monitoring across all smartphone communications. If your target uses Yahoo! Messenger on iPhone you’ll need FlexiSPY to monitor it, as FlexiSPY is currently the only cell phone monitoring software to offer Yahoo! Messenger IM logging on iPhone.
FlexiSPY also captures other popular IM services which are summarized in the table below and in the blog article here. These are compared in separate articles from this series.
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