Asking folks to install another app is a short term painful thing, but if we wanted to focus on serving this well, we had to build a dedicated and focused experience. In some countries 85 percent of people are on Facebook, but 95 percent of people use SMS or messaging. Messaging is one of the few things people do more than social networking. Having to go into an app and take a bunch of steps to get to messaging is a lot of friction. You're probably messaging people 15 times per day. These apps that are fast and just focused on messaging. We saw that the top messaging apps people were using were their own app. 10 billion messages are sent per day, but in order to get to it you had to wait for the app to load and go to a separate tab. Messaging was this behavior people were doing more and more. The primary purpose of the Facebook app is News Feed. On mobile, each app can only focus on doing one thing well, we think.
Messaging is becoming increasingly important. We wanted to do this because we believe that this is a better experience. I appreciate that that was work and required friction. Asking everyone in our community to install a new app is a big ask. We need to be able to explain clearly why what we're thinking is good.
