Categories: Mobile

Facebook launches standalone Android and iPhone messaging app

Facebook has just launched a standalone messaging app, Facebook Messenger, for Android and iOS devices. The app allows Facebook users to message friends individually or by group, send photos and share location information.

Facebook Messenger is a direct descendant of Beluga, a group messaging service that Facebook acquired in March of this year, and is the first standalone app from the social network. This app could signal the start of an emerging trend as Facebook is also rumoured to be working on a standalone photo sharing app.

With Facebook Messenger app-to-app messages are delivered via push notifications. If the receiving user does not have Facebook Messenger, the update is delivered via Facebook Chat, Facebook Messages or by good old-fashioned SMS instead.

The app imports all your existing conversations on Facebook Messages. New conversations are started by adding one or more Facebook friends or phone numbers from your list of phone contacts. The app won’t quite replace your phone’s basic SMS application just yet however, at least not until a sizable portion of the current 750 million active Facebook users download it first.

The app is currently not available in Ireland but we’re expecting it within the next few hours.

Albizu Garcia

Albizu Garcia is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gain -- a marketing technology company that automates the social media and content publishing workflow for agencies and social media managers, their clients and anyone working in teams.

View Comments

Recent Posts

Beyond Paperwork: How empathy is starting to matter in the financial industry

The so-called Great Wealth Transfer is no longer a distant prediction. It is estimated that…

13 hours ago

WEF publishes blueprint to monetize everything in nature

The WEF claims that Larry Fink & Andre Hoffmann's work on the board 'do not…

1 day ago

Fabian Society outlines how govt can ‘upscale circular economy’

How long until the wolf sheds its sheepskin? Fabians are sleepwalking society towards the 'own…

4 days ago

AI reasoning and the infinite puzzle of Borges’ Library of Babel

Many people have the intuition that an LLM (Large Language Model, e.g. ChatGPT) doesn't really understand…

1 week ago

UK’s DARPA-inspired ARIA opens ‘Engineering Ecosystem Resilience’ research opportunity

ARIA's opportunity space for engineering ecosystem resilience follows a global trend of public and private…

1 week ago

Healthcare providers now have unprecedented data insights into the patient journey as PurpleLab® acquires KAID Health

In the U.S., we’re seeing an incredible growth of the healthcare analytics market, with the…

1 week ago