Facebook Messenger's Plot to Be the Only App You Ever Need

When Facebook decoupled Messenger from the Facebook app in 2014, it ticked many, many people off. They said as much in the App Store, flooding the Messenger app with one-star ratings and angry comments about how dare Facebook make them download another app just to chat with friends. David Marcus, Facebook's VP of messaging products, recently told me that people once used Messenger to make first contact. Messenger, like all good messaging apps, has become incredibly sticky---which explains why Facebook wants to cram every imaginable feature, idea, and experiment into it. This week at F8, Facebook's annual developer conference, the Messenger team announced a handful of new features aimed at transforming Messenger from the place where you talk to friends to the place where you do everything else.