Among the several in-app features, Facebook lets you send and receive money through Messenger. You may have noticed this feature whenever you send text of a dollar amount to a friend – that number is underlined, allowing you to click on it and send over the money.
The company, however, wants to take things to the next level, and is reportedly preparing to make in-store purchases, straight from the Messenger app, a new feature.
The report comes from The Information, and could see Facebook pitting itself against the likes of Apple’s Apple Pay and Google’s Android Pay in the mobile payment business. According to the report, the code for the iOS Messenger app references a payment service, however, little is known about how exactly payments would take place and what kinds of technology Facebook would use.
The code also references other new features, such as a so-called “secret conversations” tool. Unfortunately, that’s all we know about the feature, but it could presumably be something similar to browsing incognito, where a chat history will be erased as soon as the conversation is over (a la Snapchat), or it could also be a reference to heightened encryption.
Source code also discusses the syncing of calendars and the sharing of quotes from articles, showing that Facebook wants Messenger to be a bigger part of your day-to-day life. The company has been pushing Messenger as a platform for around a year or so now, and while it hasn’t become the smartphone hub that the company might have wanted, it has become an increasingly useful tool.
Of course, considering the little information we know about the app’s future, it could be a while before we see any of these features actually released to the public. But the money-transfer feature was tipped off in the source code a few months before it went public, so using source code to predict new features is not out of the question.
