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March 21, 2014

Facebook Brings Messenger App Beta Program to Android

Facebook has been pushing for ad revenue since it’s IPO in 2012, trying to prove that they can successfully monetize and grow profits using their desktop and mobile platforms. There was initial doubt that enough people clicked on any ads when browsing Facebook to support true growth as reports started surfacing that many of the reported clicks were fabricated by bots and crawling programs of the like.

However, recently a shift has taken place that may be the light on the horizon. A transition towards focusing on mobile advertising has been seeing a lot of success. According to Facebook’s Q4 2013 earnings, a whopping 53 percent of its add revenue came from its 945 million mobile users. Considering that Facebook has a total of 1.23 billion monthly active users, having 75 percent of their active users on mobile as well is astonishing.

The power of mobile app advertising is gaining traction every day. Most recently the Facebook-acquired photo sharing app Instagram seals its first major ad deal relying exactly on the sheer amount of mobile users currently using their app.

This week Facebook announced that the beta program for their cross-platform messaging app “Messenger” would be expanding to the Android platform, as it is currently only available on iOS. "Beginning today, the Facebook Messenger for Android beta program will give people who opt-in access to the latest versions of Messenger for Android before the general release. As with the main Facebook application, our goals with this program are to expand our pool of testers and gain feedback across a more diverse set of devices,” said the statement regarding the release. 

Messenger is basically Facebook’s response to apps like Whatsapp, which was in turn an attempt to take the idea behind services like iMessage and BBM and allow them to work cross-platform. Facebook bills Messenger as “free texting from Facebook.”

The Beta program is an opt-in service allowing access to the latest versions of the app before their official release. If a user encounters an issue or bug while using the app they can report it. “The beta program will provide us with an early warning system that will help make everyone's experience with the app better,” continues the statement. This is a continuation of the Facebook for Android beta program already in place for the normal Facebook app. “The Facebook for Android beta program has already helped us improve the quality and overall experience of the main Facebook app on Android. We're excited to bring those improvements to Messenger, and to have people who use Messenger participate more in the process of building the best mobile-to-mobile messaging platform,” stated Luiz Scheidegger, software engineer at Facebook. 

Photo courtesy of https://www.facebook.com/mobile/messenger 




Edited by Cassandra Tucker


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