Facebook turned off mobile messaging, forcing everyone to install Messenger
Facebook has removed the messaging function in the mobile version of the site. Now, when trying to view a received message, users are shown a splash screen : “Your conversations are transferred to Messenger”. A simple click on the "Messages" button immediately takes you to the Play Store to install Messenger!
As usual, the PR department explains actions by caring for users in order to provide them with the “best experience”. For this “best experience”, they chose a unified Messenger platform so as not to confuse various options for sending messages. But this is bad news for millions of people who visit the mobile version of the site specifically to avoid installing Messenger .
It is unlikely that someone will be deceived by the marketing chatter of the PR department. Facebook actions have a more logical explanation. The fact is that Messenger is much more convenient to develop and monetize than a simple text chat.
“In other words, a simple service is valuable to users, but not to Facebook. This can not be tolerated! "- Ironically writes TechCrunch. The publication notes that Messenger is in all respects more than simple text messaging in terms of functionality, you can send videos and stickers, and there are even chatbots! Still, on the part of Facebook, it would be appropriate to leave to users the choice of how to communicate with each other: “By depriving of this choice, Facebook destroys the trust that should be carefully protected.”
Messenger is not just a chat, but a powerful platform that has great commercial potential. Especially if we imagine that voice interfaces will be widely used in the future , and many commercial companies will start using chatbots. For Facebook, it is critically important that Messenger be the most popular instant messenger (platform) in the world at this point.
By the way, Facebook also blocks access to the Messenger.com web interface when logging in from a mobile device, again offering to install a mobile application. To work with the site you need to fake the user agent of the browser, as well as to open the full version of the main Facebook site.
In general, Facebook’s actions are somewhat similar to Google’s actions a few years ago when the company closed the simple Google Talk text chat in favor of the Hangouts platform.