14 DAY TRIAL // There have been a lot of comments about why Facebook has pushed everyone to use the Messenger app on their mobile devices and Mark Zuckerberg himself stepped out and explained things to people. Even so, nearly half of the network’s mobile users refuse to use it.
The standalone messaging app has managed to hit the 500 million monthly users mark, which, considering all the backlash, is actually quite a decent number. As you may know, there are over a billion monthly mobile users for Facebook and over 1.3 billion monthly users for the network in general.
Back in July, Facebook shifted the instant messaging feature from the mobile app into a separate program. Users who wanted to keep sending messages to their friends while on the go, had to install the new app too, which, obviously, annoyed a lot of people.
Why do we need Messenger?
Mark Zuckerberg has recently revealed in a public Q&A that it was all done because the Facebook app is more about people checking out their friends’ feeds, while Messenger is about connecting with them like you would via any other IM tool. That being said, Zuckerberg believes that mobile apps need to do one thing well and mixing things isn’t always the best solution.
“The first thing I want to do is acknowledge that asking everyone in our community to install a new app is a big ask, and I appreciate that that required work, and it was a bunch of friction. We really believe that this is a better experience and the messaging is really important. On mobile, each app can focus on doing one thing well,” Zuckerberg said last week.
The company points out that Messenger can be used to reach people instantly, since it’s just as fast as SMS, but it gives you the ability to express yourself in ways that SMS can’t by sending stickers, videos, pictures or even to chat with groups of friends and make free calls.
Even though the app may not have attracted the best of scores when it was first introduced, it looks like people are coming around. We might see a rise in the number of Facebook Messenger users in the coming months as more and more people concede that they need it to communicate with their buddies when they’re away from their desktops.
After all, there are plenty of Facebook mobile users to adopt Messenger too.
