Through Google Play Store.
By Dileep Thekkethil
BENGALURU: Facebook on Tuesday announced that the Android version of its popular messaging app “Facebook Messenger” was downloaded more than a billion times through Google Play Store
The head of the Facebook messenger team, David Marcus said through a Facebook post, “Happy to make it to the very exclusive Android 1 billion+ downloads club.”
Looking at the records provided by Google, there are not many apps in Play Store that have received over a billion downloads. A majority of such apps are the services offered by Google and this is one reason why Facebook finds it a commendable achievement.
Even though the world’s most popular social media app is receiving praises from people across the world there are a few who believe that Facebook couldn’t have made such an achievement without killing the messenger from the Facebook app, which forced users to download the Facebook Messenger app separately to initiate a chat with their friends.
Over the last year, Facebook added few more features to the messenger app, enabling users to make video calls to their friends located anywhere in the world, free of cost. Users were also allowed to transfer files in between a chat call.
Almost identical features are offered by applications such as Skype, Google Hangouts and Apple’s FaceTime. Facebook has made the free video calling feature available for two years, but users will have to bear the data cost.
Recently, Facebook launched the first true social game for Messenger called Doodle Draw, which is similar to “Pictionary”. Until now users were able to play only GIF, audios and videos in Messenger app.