Facebook owns 4/5 of the most downloaded apps - just let that sink in for a minute. This space needs competition pretty badly.
The Kindle app may not require ability to pay via the internet, but it helps. There's also a big step to wanting to read.
Neither of these apps are going to hit the numbers that mostly non paid communications apps will hit, because of the difference in markets.
> The move allows Facebook developers to focus more exclusively on features and improvements for each individual app. Of course, it also requires users to download another Facebook property onto their smartphones, a not-so-subtle way for the company to increase app downloads.
I found this on Beluga, but it smells of an acquihire and rewrite, and predates the split by a few years: https://www.adweek.com/digital/beluga-facebook-messenger/
New to the Internet and young people have less qualms about trying things and are often able to spread things with word of mouth.
Google plus got mired down in the real name policy and the account consolidation and the usually problems associated with Google (which includes an association with Google).
On Amazon’s scale, there’s a very common mistake made by people in the 11 countries where Amazon delivers (out of a possible 192): they don’t realise that Amazon is actually hardly available internationally. They can’t have a billion users because they don’t serve countries with more than 800M inhabitants.
AWS is a different story but it’s B2B. And I think that Amazon (Prime) Video is available more widely but Amazon, for all it’s Revenue and Market share isn’t a billion-user company.
They weren’t a competition by any means, and would (speculation) most likely die if they didn’t tap into Facebook resources.
WhatsApp was only real big competition Facebook bought so far.
What's your reasoning for that? I think pre-WhatsApp acquisition most people would argue that Facebook would have died if it did not acquire Instagram...
So sometimes I'll have to download it when I don't have access to a desktop, send or read a message I needed to, and then uninstall it.
The US government is basically run from corporate interest, which has served people well for 50 years when things are good. But those corporations have no loyalty to the US. As political and economics interests shift, expect those large corporations to follow there own interests, not those of any nation.
The Chinese government, for all of its many faults, is making sure that Chinese corporations serve the interest of China. Corporations currently located in the US no longer even pay lip service to being interested in supporting the people of United States.
Yeah the worst part is that I can't tell my boss to screw off because it's my company :D We do some customer support on Facebook because so many of our users are there, otherwise I wouldn't be touching it with a 12 foot pole either.