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Last year, Facebook announced plans to merge its three major messaging networks: one day, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram Direct would all be the same service. On Friday night, The Verge spotted the first step towards Facebook’s unified messaging utopia – Facebook Messenger takes over from Instagram messaging.
On Friday, the Instagram app started displaying a message saying, “There is a new way to send messages on Instagram.” Along with cross-communication between Instagram and Facebook users, the update promises a “colorful new look,” emoji reactions, and the ability to swipe to reply to messages. Instagram’s messaging icon changes to a Facebook Messenger logo when you update. The update appears to be rolling out to iOS and Android, and for now, the transition is optional.
In a statement to The Verge, Facebook said, “A small group of people were able to switch to a new test experience for Instagram messaging. We hope they enjoy the experience and look forward to testing it in other countries so that we can continue to learn from it. Anecdotally, this deployment seems much larger than a “small group of people,” but we’ll have to take Facebook’s word.
Facebook is the dominant player in the messaging space. The world’s largest messaging app is Facebook’s WhatsApp, with around 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 the Chinese app WeChat, with 1.2 billion users.
This list does not include Apple’s iMessage, which is expected to be somewhere in the world’s top four messaging apps. In 2019, Apple said there were 900 million active iPhone users and 1.4 billion active Apple devices in total. Users often have more than one Apple device, so it’s not fair to pretend that every device is a unique user. iMessage is the default SMS service for iOS, so iMessage’s user base is likely close to the total number of iPhone users. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg certainly seems to respect Apple’s messaging game, calling iMessage Facebook’s biggest competitor by far in the messaging space in 2018.
The next big step for Facebook will be to merge WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, which would create a super network of 3.3 billion users, representing around 43% of the world’s population on a single messaging service.
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