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Meta is removing its Messenger apps for Windows and macOS
(www.theverge.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Considering the unrelenting data snatching capacity of the desktop app, there are only 3 plausible reasons Facebook, a company so maliciously money hungry that it might just prove the absence of god, would choose to deprecate it
1: something is fundamentally wrong with the app and they feel they are liable for greater damages than their potential profits
2: they’ve improved their data collection on browsers to the point that both methods are equally profitable
3: they don’t believe they need the money. (This one sincerely terrifies me)
Yeah, someone has looked at the spreadsheet and realised that basically no one uses the desktop app I'll bet
and 5. They know that they're not going to lose any meaningful number of users by getting rid of these apps that just cost them money needlessly
Facebook web on mobile browser already doesn't allow messenger, and tells you to get the app. Pulling messenger from the desktop web browser will be the next move, forcing people to app completely.
Glad I don't use it.
And that's when I'm installing Prosody on my VDS and telling family to use Conversations.
I don't have any knowledge about this in particular, but as someone with experience working at big tech companies, you're missing the most likely reason:
A lot of teams are only 3-6 developers, an engineering manager, a project manager, and a designer. Other roles like content design and QA are often shared across lots of teams. Developers with experience building native apps might be needed on other projects.