iOS 6.1.4 has made its way through the tubes, but users looking forward to any kind of major feature updates should keep holding their breath. Thursday's update only applies to the iPhone 5, and it brings an updated audio profile for the speakerphone, which comes as a surprise to both end users and developers alike.

There are no other pieces to the iOS 6.1.4 puzzle—or at least not according to Apple's public release notes. The update was not seeded to developers in advance (unlike many previous releases), likely because it's so minor by comparison. It's possible that Apple's iOS engineers are too busy to apply much time to iOS 6.x updates, as they've reportedly been hard at work on iOS 7 to ensure it's ready enough to demo at WWDC in June.

Whatsapp might be about to introduce a voice messaging service as it looks to kill the phone call as well as the SMS.

That's according to 9to5Mac, which has seen an email from Whatsapp that seems to suggest the feature is coming.

An email from the Whatsapp translation team to a Hong Kong developer said, "Thank you for translating Whatsapp into Chinese. We have added some new strings that have yet to be translated: Camera button off, Camera button on and Push-to-talk button."

Aside from getting in the game early, one of the main factors as to why iOS rose to prominence is because of its sleek, simple, aesthetically pleasing user interface and experience. Throughout the mobile operating system’s lifespan, it has looked relatively the same. However, new reports suggest that the next iteration of Apple’s mobile OS, iOS 7, is getting a stark makeover.

The report comes from 9to5Mac, and says that Jony Ive — Apple designer extraordinaire, lead designer of just about any relevant Apple product you can name — has sunk his fingers deep into iOS 7. Various sources report that iOS 7 will dispense with Apple’s trademarked sheen and gloss. The new mobile OS is also said to part with the company’s somewhat divisive skeuomorphism — a technique that makes a design look like another material.

Informa said almost 19 billion messages were sent per day on chat apps in 2012, compared with 17.6 billion SMS texts.

The shift is likely to have a big impact on mobile operators, for whom texts have been a key revenue source.

Pamela Clark-Dickson of Informa said some operators were already "seeing a decline in their messaging revenues".

According to separate estimates by research firm Ovum, more than $23bn (£15bn) of SMS revenue was lost in 2012 due to popularity of chat apps.