TEXAS: Social networking giant Facebook said its new messaging service now has more than 500 million users worldwide, the British Broadcasting Corporation reported on Tuesday.
Users of the separate Messenger app have more than doubled from 200 million in April, the company said.
Facebook
had faced a backlash after it announced it would be forcing users to
download the app to send private messages to friends over the main
Facebook service.
Users started being pushed to download the app — launched in 2011 — in July.
“Messaging
is an important part of how people stay connected and since Messenger
launched in 2011 we’ve been passionate about giving people a faster and
more expressive way to communicate,” said Facebook’s director of product
management Peter Martinazzi in a blog on Thursday.
In
April, Facebook had told users that they would need to download a
separate app to allow them to send videos, make free calls and chat with
friends.
But, the tech giant was
widely criticised by users that did not like the concept of leaving the
Facebook website to another service to send messages.
That led to the iOS App Store review score for the recent version of the Messenger app to fall to one and half stars.
“Messenger
was the first of our standalone apps, and unlike our core Facebook
apps, it focused on one use case — messaging,” Martinazzi said.
“We’ve
also continued to improve speed and reliability. Updates to Messenger
ship every two weeks so it continues to evolve and improve,” he added,
indicating that Facebook plans to stick with the app despite the
negative feedback.
Last week
Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that forcing
people to install another app was “a short term painful thing”, but
added that the benefit was that his firm could offer a “faster and more
focused” experience.
One company watcher suggested that Facebook should be cautious about risks of creating too many separate apps.
“Facebook’s
key strategy is keeping people engaged within its world — whether it’s
the Messenger app or the core Facebook app,” said Jack Kent, senior
mobile analyst at the IHS Technology consultancy.
“It
probably wouldn’t want to go down the road of having a huge variety of
separate apps, but if there is a clear and distinct difference in
functionality, then having a standalone app does make sense.”
Meanwhile,
Facebook has been trying to get on the forefront of mobile messaging,
and finalised a deal to buy popular messaging service WhatsApp last
month for about $22bn (£13.8bn).
The mobile messaging app had more than 600 million monthly users at the time of the acquisition.
Comments
Post a Comment