Facebook Messenger for Android reaches 1 billion downloads

By Andre Revilla Published June 9, 2015

Facebook Messenger is the latest app to join the three comma club, alongside Facebook, WhatsApp, Gmail, YouTube, Google Search, and Maps. Other than Google, Facebook is the only other company to have an Android app with 1 billion downloads on the Play Store.

Facebook Messenger leader David Marcus posted to his Facebook profile today celebrating the milestone saying, “Happy to make it to the very exclusive Android 1 billion+ downloads club.”

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Most of us remember the day we opened our Facebook apps to message a friend, only to see a prompt asking us to download the Messenger app. Many users begrudgingly did so, and countless others simply refused for a long while out of principle. After all, we know that modern tech users don’t like products or services forced on them.

Happy to make it to the very exclusive Android 1 billion+ downloads club.

Posted by David Marcus on Tuesday, June 9, 2015

However tough it was to accept the high pressure sales pitch, Facebook is working hard to make its Messenger app indispensable. For all billion downloaded copies, it provides users with a replacement for text messaging, social sharing, picture sharing, and even phone calls, since Facebook Messenger now supports VOIP calling between two devices. You can also send voice clips, much like the current iMessage app and WhatsApp, or send money to your friends in the app. Just last week, visual mapping was added to the Messenger app, enabling users to instantly share their locations with friends.

These new features, and those that were recently revealed at Facebook’s F8 developer conference, are part of the reason why Messenger has been downloaded 1 billion times from the Play Store. However, the social network isn’t stopping there.

Facebook is ensuring that at every turn we have the option to adopt the Messenger app instead of using the traditional Facebook method of writing on our friends’ walls.

The integration of Messenger into our mobile lives is only growing, and its ties to Facebook’s mobile app has strengthened the company’s advertising value, even though the app itself is not jam packed with advertisements.

AV Contributor

Andre Revilla is an entrepreneur and writer based in Chicago that has been covering and working in the consumer tech space…

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