Instagram Direct Merging with Facebook Messenger Chats
Last year social media giant Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced to merge Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram by 2020. As a result, now Instagram Direct is merged with Facebook Messenger chat. On 14th August Friday evening on both Android and iOS device users noticed an update screen popped up in Instagram’s mobile app with the message “There’s a New Way to Message on Instagram” with a list of new features including
- You can react with emoji’s
- Colorful Chatbox
- Swipe to Reply messages
- Forward messages to everyone
- Chat with friends who use Facebook
The report says that as of now Instagram users can’t able to text Facebook friends directly by using this new update.
Once you tap the update, the regular insta DM icon in the top right corner is replaced by the Facebook Messenger logo. Many US and Indian Instagram users greet that the chats are more colorful and the sender’s messages appear in purple and blue colors.
The Verge reports that the Facebook spokesperson said, “A small set of people were able to update to a new test experience for Instagram messaging. We hope they enjoy the experience and we are looking forward to testing it in other countries so we can keep learning from this.” Anecdotally this rollout seems a lot bigger than “a small set of people,” but we’ll have to take Facebook’s word for it.
Facebook said it was testing the experience of rebuilding the messaging infrastructure so users who were could connect to all Facebook apps with the messenger. It’s an end-to-end encrypted system and by integrating these apps, Facebook may be able to compete more directly with Apple’s iMessage.
Messaging Apps Statistics
According to Statista, WhatsApp is the biggest social messaging app with around two billion monthly active users followed by Facebook messenger and China app WeChat respectively 1.3 billion and 1.2 billion users.
In 2019, Apple said there were 900 million active iPhone users out there and they are 1.4 billion active Apple devices which mean the iMessage user base is probably close to the total number of iPhone users. So that Mark Zuckerberg said Apple’s iMessage is the biggest competitor for them.
Facebook will soon be merging WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, which would create a 3.3 billion user super network, accounting for about 43 percent of the world’s population on a single messaging service.
