Facebook says its messaging app is 1% finished - and that should make Apple and Google nervous
So big, that it doesn't even think of Messenger as an app. Facebook thinks of Messenger as a platform on which entire businesses will be built.
"We are one per cent finished, as we say at Facebook," Julien Codorniou, Facebook's director of platform partnerships, told Wired's David Rowan. "One day, there will be companies built on Messenger, and we are at the beginning of that ecosystem."
The idea is that Messenger will be an "app for everything."
Facebook wants retailers to communicate with their customers on it, instead of on their own sites. It wants you to use it to book your next flight. Or search for a nearby restaurant and share its location with your friends. Or make reservations, order flowers for a crush, and pay back your buddy for the pizza he bought you the other night. Oh, and just plain chat with your friends, of course.
That's just what the company has already talked about publicly.
Messenger exec David Marcus tells Wired that the app has only taken "the first baby steps in a series of millions of steps."
Why Google and Apple should worry
In the social network's dream universe, you'll be downloading and using far fewer apps, since more functionality will be built into Messenger itself. Facebook wants Messenger to be the "universal notification platform for the web," in the words of investor Benedict Evans.
It would be easy to dismiss ambitions like that from almost any other company. But Facebook has 1.4 billion people on its core platform, and 700 million using Messenger.
If Facebook gets its way, the mobile platform power of Apple and Google could fade.
Developers may eventually stop focusing on making their app for Android first or iOS first, and just want to make sure that it works inside Messenger. The app ecosystem will stop mattering so much. And instead of choosing to buy an iPhone to talk to their friends through iMessage or Facetime, people could become more ambivalent about their device, since they can use Messenger phone calls, video calls, and chat to communicate with anyone with any kind of phone.
Facebook's overall shopping efforts are very closely tied to Messenger.
As Facebook puts more functionality inside Messenger becomes more like Chinese "all-in-one" messaging service WeChat.
As head of Facebook product management Stan Chudnovsky puts it to Wired: "We'll look back and say 2015 was when the messaging revolution happened in the western world."