You know how you used to be able to use Facebook Messenger and Facebook proper on the same app – the main Facebook app – until the company decided that people needed a standalone app just for Messenger? Well, that sort of ‘unbundling’ is likely to continue. Hey, you wanted it, apparently.
That’s the word coming from one Facebook exec. Jordan Banks, managing director of Facebook Canada and global head of vertical strategy, recently spoke to The Canadian Press about Facebook’s plans for app growth in 2015.
“We’re getting away from that single app that does everything for you. We released nine different apps in 2014 and I think what you’ll see is we’ll release more in 2015 — at the demand and behest of our users,” he said.
“[Users] want single apps that do one thing incredibly well. So one of the reasons we took Messenger out of the [Facebook] app and gave it its own standalone app is because that’s what our users were telling us. They didn’t want to click two or three times before they got into Messenger … So I think that will be a major trend going forward, you will continue to see this multi-app orientation come from Facebook.”
Once again, you asked for this, apparently. We’ve heard this reasoning before – from CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“The primary purpose of the Facebook app is News Feed. Messaging was this behavior people were doing more and more. 10 billion messages are sent per day, but in order to get to it you had to wait for the app to load and go to a separate tab,” said Zuckerberg shortly after Facebook launched its standalone Messenger app. “We saw that the top messaging apps people were using were their own app. These apps that are fast and just focused on messaging. You’re probably messaging people 15 times per day. Having to go into an app and take a bunch of steps to get to messaging is a lot of friction.”
Despite what Facebook says, the shift did irritate users. Instead of feeling like they now had two apps that each did one thing incredibly well, many felt like they now had to have two apps when they used to have one app that did both things fine.
Long story short – you should probably get used to having more apps from Facebook on your phone. That is, of course, if you want to get the full Facebook experience.
Just a couple weeks ago, Facebook debuted a standalone app for stickers for Messenger. Why is it a separate app? Because you asked for it, of course.