Facebook has announced an interesting product which is now available to people and which has the feature of sign up without the Facebook account. With the help of this product, which is currently available for Android devices and later on this will also be able to iOS, the users will be able to sign up with the help of just a name and phone number without having the Facebook account.
This seems that the Facebook has realized the limited reach of the messenger and now it lets you to messages your contacts whether or not they have joined the Facebook.
The Messenger for non-Facebook users is available now at the Android app. Currently this facility is available to limited set of countries including India, Australia, Indonesia, Venezuela and South Africa. According to the senior officials of the company, this facility will soon reach to the rest of the world.
The messenger for iOS will also be made available shortly with the same feature of signing up with the help of just phone number and name but the company has not given a scheduled date for this. This latest development has been informed to the press by the company’s mobile product manager Peter Deng.
When non-Facebook users set to sign up this app, then this app will lead them to their contacts. Then the users will be able to select by name to send a message to a single person or to group. This initiative has been taken by the company after getting inspired from third party free messaging apps like Pinger and WhatsApp. There are rumors in the market that Facebook is going to acquire WhatsApp in the near future.
The most important thing about this app is that this messenger for Android users will be free and will show zero ads. Thus this messenger will have an added benefit over the some available similar apps that are paid or ad-supported. According to a research report, if Facebook finalizes to acquire the WhatsApp messaging app, then this could be potentially operated separately and there might be chances of paid subscription for this app. But in this case too, this current messenger for non-Facebook users will work for free with no ads feature.
According to some leading analysts of the market, this step pr move by the Facebook for non-Facebook users is a bold one. This shows that now Facebook has accepted that not everyone is interested in opening an account on the leading social media site. This feature also provides benefits to the existing users of the Facebook in the way that by getting the non-users on the Messenger, they will not have to pay to SMS them or send them photos.
Firstly, the Facebook will start this service from India where the company has just 65 million users out of the population of 1 billion. This might be the positive move by the company as in this case they can get more sign ups.
Tags: Android devices, iOS, Messenger, Pinger app, WhatsApp