Facebook users who rely on the company’s Messenger app to communicate with their friends, family members, and coworkers are in for a change now that the company has announced it’s unveiling a new, more streamlined version of its communication app.
The new “Messenger 4” will be vastly aesthetically simpler, according to the company, with a number of changes being made to reorient the service towards strict, efficient communication.
Goodbye Revenue, Hello Communication
For the past few years, Facebook has been continuously releasing updates to its Messenger app that are predominately geared towards monetizing the platform and scooping up more revenue from users.
By introducing new forms of payment or entertainment like games, for instance, the Messenger app was supposed to draw in more dollars from consumers making relatively small micro-transactions.
The new Messenger 4 update turns the app back towards communication, however, focusing on the bare-bones message service instead of purchases.
Executives at Facebook were reportedly concerned that earlier versions of the app were simply too much to deal with, turning many consumers off.
“If you look at something like this, I don’t know if the first word you would use is ‘simple,'” product manager David Breger told The Verge
According to an update placed on Facebook Newsroom, more than 7 out of 10 of Facebook’s Messenger app users reported that simplicity was their top priority. The website design company claims that its new version of the app will help users achieve the authenticity and simplicity they’re looking for when communicating with friends and family, claiming that the new version is easier to navigate but doesn’t get rid of popular customization options.
Statistics issued by Facebook illustrate just how monstrously popular of a service that Messenger really is. The company claims that more than 1.3 billion people use the service each month, for instance, with more than 400 million individuals using voice and video features every month in particular.
More than 10 billion messages are traded on the platform every month, it claims, with 300,000 active bots joining human participants to populate the service.
Outside of its Messenger 4 news, Facebook continues to find itself in hot water in the media thanks to another data breach. An attack on Facebook’s computer network recently resulted in the exposure of the data of some 50 million individuals, according to the New York Times, the latest in a long line of information scandals that’s beset the tech giant.
