Facebook promises to improve Messenger this year

With Yahoo Messenger out of the picture for mobile users, many people turned to WhatsApp and other similar products. Although Facebook managed to grab a solid share of the market with the help of its Messenger app, this piece of code really struggles when its usability comes into play.

A recent article posted by Facebook's David Marcus, reveals why the Messenger ended up as a cluttered app with quite a few outdated parts. "Over the last two years, we built a lot of capabilities to find the features that continue to set us apart. A lot of them have found their product market fit; some haven’t. While we raced to build these new features, the app became too cluttered. Expect to see us invest in massively simplifying and streamlining Messenger this year," he wrote.

Facebook Messenger has more than 1.3 billion monthly users and it could soon expand into territories left untouched until now, for example by being optimized to act as a customer support channel for businesses and for marketing purposes.

For now, it is not clear yet what will go away and what will remain in Facebook Messenger in terms of features, but the comments posted in reply to the article mentioned above can give us a few clues. Messenger's out of date set of emojis could be easily refreshed to match the Unicode standard, not to mention that the intrusive Facebook Messenger ads that recently rolled out in Asia are not something loved by many users.

At last, it should be noted that many believe it would be a good idea for those behind Facebook Messenger to take a look at the "simple but effective" work of their competitors, namely the WhatsApp team.