Why you’re forced to use Facebook Messenger

DO you hate Facebook’s Messenger app? Join the club. Everyone is livid at having to download the cumbersome app to chat to friends, so what’s the story?

Why you’re forced into Facebook’s most hated feature

YOU either kinda like it or really hate it. Facebook’s Messenger app was forced upon everyone in August when the company stopped allowing users to access their messages within the main Facebook app.

While, of course, the Messenger app popped right up to the top of both the Android and iPhone App Store, it was full of angry one or two star reviews from users not happy with being forced to use it.

Facebook never really gave anyone an answer as to why it made the move. Until now.

Speaking to a live Q&A session, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained the move as something to make Facebook a better user experience.

“Asking everyone in our community to install a new app is a big ask,” Zuckerberg said. “I appreciate that that was work and required friction. We wanted to do this because we believe that this is a better experience. Messaging is becoming increasingly important. On mobile, each app can only focus on doing one thing well, we think.”

Whether it be a group chat, messaging or phone calls, Facebook wants you to use Messenger for it all.

The idea is that the main Facebook app is to be people’s Newsfeed, while the Messenger app is for people to use to chat independently. Zuckerberg said that Facebook wanted to eliminate friction between the messaging and traditional Facebook experience.

“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,” Zuckerberg said. “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.”

What do you think of the Messenger app? Tell us in the comments below.