Last year, Facebook announced a plan to merge its three major messaging networks: once WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram Direct would all be the same service. Last Friday, The Verge made the first move toward Facebook’s uniform utopia – Facebook Messenger takes over Instagram messaging.
On Friday, the Instagram app started posting a message that said, “There’s a new way to post on Instagram.” In addition to cross-communication between Instagram and Facebook users, the update introduces a “new colorful look”, emoji responses, and the ability to swipe to reply to messages. The Instagram messaging icon turns into a Facebook Messenger logo when you update. The update seems to be rolling out on iOS and Android, and for now, the transition is optional.
In a statement to The Verge, Facebook said, ‘A small set of people could update to a new test experience for Instagram messaging. We hope they enjoy the experience and we look forward to testing in other countries so we can learn from it. ‘ Anecdotally, this outrage seems a lot bigger than “a small set of people”, but we have to take Facebook’s word for it.
Facebook is the dominant player in the messaging space. The world’s largest messaging app is Facebook’s WhatsApp, with about two billion monthly active users, according to Statista. Facebook Messenger is the second largest service on Statista’s list, with 1.3 billion users, followed by China’s WeChat app, with 1.2 billion users.
That list does not include Apple’s iMessage, which should be somewhere in the top four messaging apps worldwide. In 2019, Apple said there were 900 million active iPhone users, and a total of 1.4 billion active Apple devices. Users often have more than one Apple device, so it is not fair to claim that each device is one unique user. iMessage is the default iOS text service for iOS, so the iMessage user base is probably close to the total number of iPhone users. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems keen to respect Apple’s messaging game, calling iMessage Facebook ‘by far the biggest competitor’ in the news space in 2018.
The next big move for Facebook will merge WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, which would create a super network of 3.3 billion users, about 43 percent of the world population on one messaging service.
