Over the last few years, Facebook Inc. has added quite a few apps to its catalogue, from third-party services like Instagram and WhatsApp to standalone Facebook tools like Moments and Messenger. Today, Facebook has launched yet another app, this time focusing on the social network’s popular Events features.

The aptly named Events from Facebook is aimed at users who want to keep up with all of the fun things to do in their local communities.

“Every day, more than 100 million people use Facebook events to discover things they can do with their friends — from festivals and 5Ks to neighborhood fairs and nightlife,” Aditya Koolwal, a product manager at Facebook, wrote in a blog post. “With hundreds of millions of events shared on Facebook every year, the fear of missing out is becoming a thing of the past.”

Events offers a few improvements over the event features in the core Facebook app. For one thing, you do not need to hunt through multiple tabs to find your events, and the user interface is actually legible and makes sense. The app also offers lists of upcoming events that your friends are interested in, as well as events from pages you like or locally trending topics.

One of the most useful features added to the new app is the ability to import your personal calendar from your phone into your Events calendar, making it easier to plan ahead.

Events is available on iOS today, and an Android version will be arriving “soon.”

Why separate apps?

Events is yet another example of Facebook’s belief that standalone apps are capable of offering a better experience than if the company were to try to build those same features into the core Facebook app. About two years ago, Facebook made a similar move with Messenger, which moved Facebook’s messaging features into a separate app.

“The reason why we wanted to do this is because we really believe that this is a better experience,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said of Messenger during a community Q&A in 2014. “… Each app can focus on doing one thing well, and the primary focus of the Facebook app today is News Feed.”

Moving messaging into a separate app angered many users at the time, many of whom did not understand the need to install a separate app, but with a user base of over 1 billion people, it seems that even the most stubborn users have finally given in and installed Messenger.

Fortunately, it does not look like Facebook plans to do the same thing with events, at least not yet, but given Messenger’s success, the possibility is still there. Of course, considering how awful managing events in the core Facebook app is, that might not be a bad thing.

Image courtesy of Facebook Inc.