Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), in April, announced that it will start a separate Facebook Messenger app for the mobile devices. The social networking site has tested the app in Europe, and now it plans to roll-over the app in other countries, also. The company stated on Monday that every user will get a version in the next few days, and they will have to download messenger for sending and receiving the message.
Facebook Messenger – Users have one-week time
After launch of the app in next few days, users will get a notification and a one-week time to download the messenger, after which the messaging app will not work. The desktop or mobile version will not be affected, in the browser.
Facebook said in a statement to NBC News, “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.”
In the previous versions, users could chat from the messages tab in Facebook smartphone apps, and they could download messenger, receive the notifications of the messages and tapping it would switch the user to Messenger.
Instead of posting this change on its blog post, Facebook gave notifications to the users directly. Some users might find it annoying as it will require managing two different Facebook apps. Then there might be users, who will enjoy multi-tasking.
Facebook Messenger – Is Facebook fair with users?
Facebook has acknowledged the fact that content exchange is done more through Messenger as people send more group messages, videos, stickers and audio clips while using Messenger. There are 200 million users on Messenger sending 12 billion messages a day, and the social networking site want to focus on this app instead of developing and maintaining parallel code inside the main app.
Messenger outperforms the previous app as it is faster, simpler and fun to send messages, with lots of potential to get even better eventually. Recently, Facebook added recorded video sharing and a slick split-screen selfie button for taking shots and videos in no-time.
The heavy-handed move will certainly not go well with the people already not interested of Facebook, and also it will hit the image of the social networker that it does what it wants irrespective of the users demand.
