Facebook's standalone messenger app now has 700 million users, up from 600 million in late March. Announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday during Facebook's annual investor meeting, the milestone represents a major win for the company—particularly considering the initial user push-back and outrage when the company first announced its decision to separate messaging from the main Facebook app last summer.
As Forbes reported in November of last year when Messenger hit 500 million users, the decision to split the messaging feature from the nucleus of the Facebook app was driven by a desire to simplify the messaging process for users. Zuckerberg laid out the rationale behind the Messenger app at a Facebook town hall meeting, where he said: "There are more than 10 billion messages sent every day on Facebook, but in order to get to your messages, you had to open up the app—which could take a few seconds—and then go to a separate tab. And what we saw was that all of the messaging apps that people were using and they relied on the most were—kind of—these dedicated, focused experiences."
