Facebook is hoping to gain a stronger foothold in the competitive
mobile messaging space with an updated version of its Messenger app,
which now lets people message each other even if they aren’t Facebook
friends.
This week the company announced an
update to its standalone Messenger app, which lets users send text
messages to each other, but without the usual other content on Facebook
like the news feed and timeline profiles.
The updated app was available previously in a testing mode to a small
number of users on Android-based devices, but now is available more
widely to people on both Android and iOS.
Before the update, the app let users send messages just to their
Facebook friends. Now it lets people send messages to anyone with a
Facebook account – even if they’re not friends – as long as the sender
knows the person’s phone number. The message appears in the recipient’s
Messenger app or in the person’s Facebook messages folder.
By using Facebook’s network to send the message, it saves the sender
an SMS charge, similar to other mobile-to-mobile messaging services like
WhatsApp,
Snapchat
and WeChat,
which have become popular among teenagers and young adults.
Messenger’s new feature may allow Facebook to better compete against
those services. Facebook is losing some of its younger
teenage users on a daily basis, the company reported during its
last earnings call.
The new Messenger app is also designed to be faster, by letting users
see which of their Facebook friends are on Messenger. An icon will
appear next to the names of people who have downloaded Messenger, which
means that those users will be notifie
