Facebook Messenger has now been downloaded over 1 billion times on Google Play, joining an exclusive club made up of only the top apps in the Play Store.

Facebook Inc.’s standalone messaging app has come a long way since it was introduced last year. The social network initially faced a strong backlash against Messenger, as many users were upset that they were being forced to download a separate app to use Facebook’s chat features, which had previously been available through the core Facebook mobile app.

Zuckerberg responds to initial questions

During Facebook’s first “Q&A with Mark” session in November, a user asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “Why did you force us to install Messenger?”

“The first thing that I want to do is just acknowledge that asking everyone in our community to install another app, Messenger, is a big ask,” Zuckerberg responded at the time. “The reason why we wanted to do this is because we really believe that this is a better experience, and we think that messaging is becoming increasingly important. On mobile, each app can really focus on doing one thing well, and the primary focus of the Facebook app today is newsfeed.”

He added, “In order to get to your messages, you had to open up the app, which would take a few seconds, and then go to a separate tab. What we saw was that all of the messaging apps that people were using and that they relied on the most were kind of these dedicated, focused experiences.”

Less than a week after the Q&A session, Facebook announced that Messenger had already reached 500 million monthly active users, placing it ahead of Twitter and just behind Facebook’s other popular chat app, WhatsApp.

At first Messenger was little more than a text messaging app, but Facebook has been progressively adding more and more features to Messenger, including video calling, VOIP, location services, and in-app payments. Facebook’s long-term plans regarding Messenger involve turning it into a full-fledged app development platform.

With Messenger’s 1 billion downloads achievement being for Google Play only, the actual total is much higher if App Store downloads are taken into account.

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