Facebook app is dropping its built-in chat feature in replacement of a standalone messenger app. The announcement related to this was made by Mark Zuckerberg late last year and the company has been testing the standalone app for months. Since few months, users that have both standalone app and the built-in version installed, was diverted to the messenger software when accessing chat in the built-in version. Now the complete switch to the standalone messenger app will take place over the next two weeks.
In November, Zuckerberg told TechCrunch that “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.”
This means that users will now have to download a separate Messenger app to converse with their Facebook friends, which may not be welcomed by many users who do not want to maintain more than one Facebook app. But a separate app will be faster, stable and more feature rich that would better compete with other messaging apps.
SOURCE: TechCrunch
