Facebook is taking its standalone app strategy to an extreme new level today. It’s starting to notify users they’ll no longer have the option to send and receive messages in Facebook for iOS and Android, and will instead have to download Facebook Messenger to chat on mobile.
Facebook’s main apps have always included a full-featured messaging tab. Then a few...
months ago, users who also had Facebook’s standalone Messenger... app installed had the chat tab of their main apps replaced with a hotlink button that would open Messenger.
months ago, users who also had Facebook’s standalone Messenger... app installed had the chat tab of their main apps replaced with a hotlink button that would open Messenger.
But this was optional. If you wanted to message inside Facebook for iOS or Android, you just didn’t download Messenger. That’s not going to be an option any more.
Notifications about the change are going to out to some users in Europe starting today, and they’ll have about two weeks before the requirement to download Messenger kicks in. Eventually, all Facebook users will get migrated to this new protocol. And you can bet some users are going to be angry.
In an on stage talk I did with Mark Zuckerberg in November, the CEO revealed an explanation for today’s change that Facebook’s PR team just referred me to:
“the other thing that we’re doing with Messenger is making it so once you have the standalone Messenger app, we are actually taking messaging 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.”
Essentially, Facebook sees Messaging within its main apps as slow, buried, and sub-optimal overall. Its numbers probably indicate that people message more and have a better experience on the standalone Messenger app.
But forcing users to adopt a new messaging behavior could be very unpopular among some. Not everyone wants to manage multiple Facebook apps on their homescreen or stick them in a folder. A portion of Facebook users may prefer to keep things simple with one app for everything Facebook, even if it means its slower and takes more taps to get to their messages.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/09/facebook-messenger-or-the-highway/?utm_campaign=fb&ncid=fb
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