"Facebook split Messenger off into its own app to save you one extra click on the Messages tab."
Uhm, what? What they did was forcing their users to open up a separate app to do something with was working great already within the app, without having to open up a separate app. But now every time you want to do messaging, you have to wait the extra two seconds for "Messenger" to open up.
What a terrible example by the TechCrunch author. Maybe he was ironic?
If you took a moment to think of use cases other than your own, you would realize that there's a lot of us that ONLY use facebook messenger. I haven't checked my newsfeed in ages.
Good for you, and all other Messenger-only-users. But why force all other users who are using the Facebook-app to open up a separate app when they want to send or read messages?
They expected to add a TON of complexity to the messenger product (they announced messenger as a platform at F8) and they needed a way to decouple the already complex main FB app. It buys them a bunch of things, like easier maintenance, extensibility, and ability to push updates independently among other user experience benefits.
They also didn't want to split the user experience of using Facebook messenger on mobile and hence the forced switch.
It was only a big deal because of the surface area of the world that the main Facebook product (w/ messenger) covers. I guarantee you that if Google did something like that no one would care (at least not enough to give 20,000+ 1 star reviews)
Yeah I'm one of the messenger-only people, and (obviously) I'm really happy I can use the messenger-only app, but, wow, the way they handled the integration w/ the main FB app is ungodly inelegant, almost to the level of being insulting to the user, IMO.
They had a good blog post about this, which gave a good explanation. Basically it said that some huge percentage of FB app use was messsanger, so why not optimise for that use case instead?
Imagine a venn diagram, where the left circle is "FB users" and the right is "Messanger users". I think it's a quite big overlap. Are you seriously suggesting it was a right decision to degrade the service for the users using both services?
That's not optimizing, it's just plain stupid.
Nothing would have prevented them from both a) letting people do simple messaging inside the FB app, while at the same time b) providing a kick ass advanced separate Messanger app for the users only interested in messaging.
I thought it was a technical reason, like there was only so much you could do with an ios app so they needed to turn it into two. I don't develop ios so it wasn't clear to me exactly what the issue was.
Because of this change it now takes 1-14 days for my to respond to a facebook message. I see no need to install a separate app when I'm already debating uninstalling facebook's app. And usually I'm not motivated to log into facebooks' website just to read and respond to the message. So they sit there until I finally get bored enough to do it. Granted, in all fairness, I probably get under 4 messages a month.
While the TechCrunch article is a little off stating it's to save you an extra click Facebook has come out and said splitting it optimized the user experience for the majority of the messenger users. So while their statement is a little off the sentiment is accurate.
Uhm, what? What they did was forcing their users to open up a separate app to do something with was working great already within the app, without having to open up a separate app. But now every time you want to do messaging, you have to wait the extra two seconds for "Messenger" to open up. What a terrible example by the TechCrunch author. Maybe he was ironic?