Facebook has begun contacting their user base, to advise that they have begun divesting the main Facebook app of the Messenger function. Starting in the next few days, if you use the Messenger portion of Facebook, you’ll need to download a new app to chat with your Facebook friends.
The change to the Facebook app and introduction of a Facebook Messenger app began in Europe where their positive reaction and feedback, has helped the company make the decision to accelerate the roll out to other parts of the world.
Facebook has stated the change will let it focus its development efforts better on the two apps separately. The Facebook Messenger function is immensely popular, with Facebook reporting that users have sent over 12 billion messages a day.
The Facebook representative advised:
In the next few days, we’re continuing to notify more people that if they want to send and receive Facebook messages, they’ll need to download the Messenger app. As we’ve said, our goal is to focus development efforts on making Messenger the best mobile messaging experience possible and avoid the confusion of having separate Facebook mobile messaging experiences. Messenger is used by more than 200 million people every month, and we’ll keep working to make it an even more engaging way to connect with people.
Facebook also stated:
The other thing that we’re doing with Messenger is making it so once you have the standalone Messenger app, we are actually taking Messenger out of the main Facebook app. And the reason why we’re doing that is we found that having it as a second-class thing inside the Facebook app makes it so there’s more friction to replying to messages, so we would rather have people be using a more focused experience for that.
Facebook of late has begun to progress users away from an all-in-one app solution centred around Facebook. With the purchase of large name entities such as Instagram and WhatsApp, CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has called features that are buried inside the main Facebook app ‘second-class’. Parting out functionality will allow Facebook to check the functionality and popularity of each function more directly, as well as allowing faster updates. This latest update gives a little more insight into Facebooks mobile strategy moving forward.
There’s no official date for when Facebook will update to its main app along with the messenger app, which are said to have some major overhauls in them design wise. If you want to make sure you’re ready for the changeover, you’re probably best of installing the Messenger app now, which is available on Google Play.
Do you use Facebook? If so, do you mind having two apps or would one app with everything be far more beneficial to your needs?
Received a sympathetic email from facebook informing me of this change.
and in today’s news, social media trailblazer “facebook” continues to innovate bold new ways to annoy all of its users
Hope this doesn’t affect the free Facebook access on my plan.
It’s still routing through the facebook servers so in theory: it shouldn’t. But it’s probably worth checking with your carrier.