With the popularity of Android, plenty of applications have managed to cross over the one billion installs threshold on the Play Store. It’s a lot more selective in the five billion-plus club, which only two non-Google apps have ever succeeded in joining. You can finally bump that count up to three, as Facebook Messenger achieved a new milestone for installs just this week.
This occasion marks the fourteenth app to hit the five billion mark on Google Play, joining the likes of YouTube, Google Maps, and Gmail. It also continues Facebook’s streak as the only company besides Google to have an app achieve this amount of installs. Messenger is the third app from the social network to reach this tier, following the Facebook app in 2019 and WhatsApp in early 2020.
Despite no small number of controversies, this marker shows just how much people rely on Facebook for communication. The company has been working to boost its chatting empire, building a cross-platform backend to eventually allow all three of its messaging apps to work together. There’s still plenty of work to be done, though, especially on the privacy front. Messenger has yet to implement end-to-end encryption, and it’ll be a while before that changes. Even as users become more focused on privacy, this milestone serves as a reminder that apps like Signal and Telegram have a long way to go before either approach anything resembling Messenger’s popularity.
You can download the latest version of Messenger using the link below, or grab the APK from APK Mirror.