Facebook messenger app has more than half a billion active users

Facebook has announced on their blog that the Messenger app now has more than 500 million monthly active users. Facebook messenger is a text and photo messaging tool that allows Facebook users to communicate with their Facebook friends just like text SMS. Though messenger work just like SMS but it gives you an opportunity to express yourself that SMS can’t. You can send text messages, send stickers and photos, take selfies, chat with Group and make free calls using Facebook messenger app. People tend to reply 20% faster on messenger than on Facebook, according to the Social Network’s FAQ.

Facebook messenger app was launched back in 2011. It was Facebook’s first standalone app focused on one use case – Messaging. Messenger was having around 200 million active users in April this year; so the active users have more than doubled in past six months. Facebook has begun forcing people to download separate messaging app to send private messages through Facebook. They get widely criticized by the users to force them to download the separate messenger app. Messenger app has also faced lower ratting in apple store due to the same reason. The current version of the app has only 1.5 stars in Apple app store.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has recently acknowledged about the company’s decision of forcing users to download the separate app:

“Asking everyone in our community to install another app is a big ask. That required work and a lot of friction and I just want to acknowledge that up front. The reason why we wanted to do this is because we really believe that this is a better experience. We think that messaging is becoming increasingly important. On mobile, each app can focus on doing one thing well. The primary purpose of the Facebook app is News Feed. … What we saw was all of the messaging apps that people were using, that they relied on the most, were these dedicated, standalone experience.

Even though it was a short-term, painful thing to ask folks to install a separate messaging app, we knew that we could never deliver the quality of experience as just a tab inside the main Facebook app.”

Peter Martinazzi, director of product management at Facebook, has written in an official blog post: “This is an exciting milestone but with a half billion people relying on Messenger to communicate and connect, it is also a reminder that there is so much left for us to do.” They have also shown the commitment to update the app twice in a month to improve the reliability and the speed of the messenger application.

Are you one of the 500 million users of the Facebook messenger app? What are the feature and updates you are looking for in the next version of the app? Share your thoughts in the comment box below.