In August 2011, Facebook introduced Messenger, an iPhone and Android app that spun off the social network’s chat feature into a stand-alone experience. Meant to compete with texting plans from wireless carriers—and made possible by Facebook’s acquisition of a messaging startup called Beluga—the app was an instant hit. And it’s been an enduring one: Messenger hit one billion monthly active users in 2016 and was the world’s most-downloaded app in 2019, according to App Annie.
Along the way, it supplemented its original text-based conversations with everything from voice and video calls to games to payments to bots to Snapchat-style stories. As its user base and ambitions grew, so did its size. What had been a wafer-thin 8.5MB download in 2012 expanded to take up 130MB of space on users’ iPhones. That’s about twice the size of WhatsApp, another Facebook messaging app that offers many similar features.
But now Facebook has put the iOS version of Messenger on an extreme…
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Source : fastcompany.com
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