As a Chinese student, I began to use Facebook 2 month ago. Within our business plan group, we choose Messengers as the connect tool.
Then I wonder why FB makes Messenger as a separate App instead of put it in main mobile app like Weibo did in China. I did some research on it, and I found many users were outraged because they did not want to use a separate app for messaging. “The reason why we wanted to do this is because we really believe that this is a better experience and we think that messaging is becoming increasingly important. And messaging was this behavior that people were doing more and more. There are more than 10 billion messages sent every day on Facebook, said Zuckerberg.
Therefore, I think the Messenger turning off the main mobile does not make sense, which means this movement is not important; the most important thing is that Zuckerberg wanted to create pure instant-messaging software. It takes time for users to be used to using it as a separate app.
However, I am afraid there are some problems for Messengers as a user. First, it takes about few seconds for users to go to a new separate tab, as most people users connect with are their Facebook friends. I do not think it is convenient enough for users, so the quicker switching or better connection of Facebook is very necessary in short time. Second, users may more rely on other mature messaging apps like Whatsapp, Wechat in Asia, or iMessage on their phones.
This movement of FB seems like it is not efficient enough, but I understand forcing users to switch to the separate Messenger app will be better in the long run. Every time you receive a message from FB, you should go to Messengers and this reminds you that Messengers is a messaging app that you used a lot. People will be used to use it one day because all his or her Facebook friends are there. Messengers would be a successful app in the long run as it has already got strong user basis.
At last, whether you like it or not, now that Facebook Messenger passed 500 million monthly active users and the Facebook-owned Whatsapp messaging app said that it hit 600 million active users as of August 2014; it means that Facebook’s messaging apps have over 1 billion aggregate monthly users.