Facebook Messenger is one of the most widely used cross-platform messaging services available today. What started out as an app that allowed Facebook users to stay in touch with each other now offers a plethora of features on top of its core feature set. It offers features that include Stories, a gaming platform, the ability to make payments, and chatbots. That makes the app feel a lot cluttered, though, and this is something that Facebook has realized. The company has promised that it’s going to remove the clutter from Facebook Messenger this year.
No wonder Facebook had to release a Messenger Lite for Android which only offers the basic messaging functionality for users in emerging markets. It later decided to roll out this iteration of Messenger globally.
David Marcus, Facebook’s vice president of messaging products, writes in a blog post that the company has added a lot of capabilities to Messenger over the past couple of years in order to set it apart from the competition. “A lot of them have found their product market fit; some haven’t,” he writes.
Marcus concedes that as the company raced to build these new features, the app became too cluttered. “Expect to see us invest in massively simplifying and streamlining Messenger this year,” he promises.
That’s all well and good, but Facebook has kind of left us hanging here. The company hasn’t said what parts of Messenger it views as clutter and precisely how it’s going to streamline those parts to provide an improved user experience. These crucial bits of information are conveniently missing from today’s blog post.
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