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THE CEO OF Facebook has explained why the company decided to make its users download its messaging app.
Facebook Messenger became a mandatory download in July, much to the annoyance of its users. While it was effective, more than 500 million Android users downloaded the app, many were annoyed about Facebook directing it away from the main app and onto a different app.
At a public Q&A session, Mark Zuckerberg explained the company’s thought process behind the decision, acknowledging that making people download an app was bound to annoy a lot of people.
The first thing I want to do is acknowledge that asking everyone in our community to install another app, Messenger, is a big ask so I appreciate that that required work and [caused] a bunch of friction and I just wanted to acknowledge that up front.
So why did they do it? The simple reason was it boils down to the entire experience and simplifying it for users.
The reason why we wanted to do this is because we believe this is a better experience. We think that messaging is becoming increasingly important so on mobile, each app can focus on doing one thing well, we think, and the primary purpose of the Facebook app is News Feed.Messaging was this behaviour that people were doing more and more, there were 10 billion messages sent every day, but in order to get to your messages, you had to open the app, which would take a few seconds, and then go to a separate tap, and we saw that the top messaging apps people were using were these dedicated focused experiences.
The continued focus on messaging apps and their growing importance meant it made more sense for the company to create an experience that plays to this strength instead of cluttering the main app with different actions.
Even though it was a short-term, painful thing to ask folks to install a separate messaging app, we knew we could never deliver the quality or experience inside as just a tab in the main Facebook app… we needed to build a dedicated and focused experience.
He also addressed the issue of why downloading it was mandatory instead of giving users a choice in the matter.
One of the biggest challenges about building products at Facebook is we build for the whole community … The reason is that we’re trying to build an experience and a service that is good for everyone in the community, and one of the things that we found is because Messenger is faster and more focused, if you’re using it, you respond to messages faster.
We realise that we have a lot to earn in terms of trust and proving that this standalone messenger experience is going to be really good, and we’re really committed to that and we have a team of our most talented people working on this.
Zuckerberg covered a number of other topics during the hour-long Q&A. Among them was his feelings on the 2010 movie, The Social Network, which he said he found “hurtful”.
“The reality is that writing code and building a product and building a company is not a glamorous enough thing to make a movie about. It would have been me sitting at a computer coding for two hours straight … They just kind of made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful.”
The question of why he always wears a grey t-shirt no matter what he’s doing (he has more than one, thankfully).
I’m in this really lucky position where I get to wake up every day and help serve more than one billion people, and I feel like I’m not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things [that weren't important]. Even though it kind of sounds silly that that’s my reason for wearing a grey t-shirt every day, it’s also true.
And in case you’re wondering, Facebook was never meant to be cool. Instead, his aim was to make Facebook a utility that always there for people to use and rely on.
“You go home, you turn on the lights, right? You’re probably not like, “Yeah, electricity!” It just needs to work. My goal is that the ability to connect and communicate should be that. It just should work.”
The entirety of Zuckerberg’s Q&A can be found here.
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Still haven’t downloaded that pesky app.it can feck right off
Forced to download Facebook Messenger… That in itself made me uninstall Facebook from my phone.
The headline makes it sound like they held a gun to peoples heads. Download it or die.
Would you not just use the internet mobile page on your phone? Don’t need the messenger app to check your messages
Great idea ! Just uninstall it from phone to! Having it in PC is more than enough !
M.
My problem was not the work of downloading the app, the problem was the privileges you afforded the app. Facebook messenger uses every facility on my phone from the ability to use my money to send messages, enabling GPS so it knows where I am. And the camera or mike to be enabled as the user sees fit. Twitter works fine for social media
AFAIK the permissions are not hugely different to other messaging apps like Snapchat. With iPhone you can tailor things like switching off location services, not so sure about Android though.
The permissions are needed so that you can send a picture using the app, take a photograph using the app, show where you are when you send a message and so on. They are nothing different to other apps.
It’s android, we can do so so much more :)
I wasnt forced to do anything. I stopped using the lifedrain.
First World problems
What a load of lies. There’s no good reason why both apps couldn’t ping off the same API, with minimal support for the existing UI.
The reason they mandated messenger is that they wanted to force their user base on to an app that does much more, and competes with existing apps the users might have.
I had concerns with what the app’s requested permissions, so I probably wouldn’t have downloaded anyway, but I certainly wasn’t going to be bullied onto another service for the sake of a few PMs.
If it’s important, phone me, if its not, I’ll get to your message when I’m next in front of a PC
Caused “a bunch of friction”… go team murica!
I didn’t download the app, just go into Facebook on Safari and see your message on that!!
I’ve found that using the Messenger app uses less data than sending and receiving messages on the regular FB app. Important when you’ve only a set amount of data in your monthly plan, if you use FB messages a lot. Yeah, it’s annoying having an extra app on your phone, but I find the benefits outweigh that :)
I just don’t use facebook anymore is all that happened! Best thing that ever happened!
If they “made up a bunch of stuff” for the Social Network, wonder why he didn’t sue the studio?
Maybe he’s just not the litigious type, and decided to get on with enjoying his success and youth while he has it.
Actually this suited me perfectly.
Now I can talk to those few people who don’t use Whatsapp or Viber without having to suffer all the inane shyte that’s posted on the main site.
Blah… Blah.. Blah… Our subscriber growth is tumbling especially in the 16-20 demographic and we desperately need a way to entangle users further into our product offering.
Did you say something else Mark? Because that’s all I heard.
Nobody was forced to download the messenger app. Ridiculous hyperbole. Just use the browser on your phone.
They are referring to the removal of the messaging functionality from the main FB app. You need it in an app if you want proper pop up notifications. Browsers are no place to do messaging.
as someone who uses facebook advertising for business and spends money on Facebook ads, on the surface the separate messenger app take away some/much of the audience from my adverts. the ads don’t display in the messenger app.
i’d love to see stats on how adverts have been performing since the messenger app went live. I know how ours are performing and there is a definate drop of late but can’t say whether the two are related or not.
how exactly do facebook plan on monetizing the messenger app?
Am I the only person that doesn’t have it, and I can still message from fb??
B!tcht!ts
I’m still using MSN Messenger. You can use a program called Messenger reviver to continue to use it. Skype is so soulless and Facebook is for boring narcissists.
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