Roughly half of all American smartphone owners use the Messenger app, according to industry estimates, and Facebook is aiming to capture greater numbers in international markets. The new security feature highlights Facebook’s ambitions for Messenger, which now sees more than 900 million regular monthly users, up from 200 million in early 2014. Lyft: The co-founders of the ride-hailing platform will step down from their day-to-day responsibilities at the company, which has struggled through layoffs and disappointing financial results.Some employees wonder if the device makes sense for Apple. Apple: The iPhone maker is expected to unveil an augmented reality headset in a few months.To widen opportunities for students, a historically Black university has set up its own internship placement program. Tech Internships: Critics say that the recruitment process at big tech firms often gives an advantage to well-connected and wealthier candidates.A Crisis at Meta: Mass layoffs, an absentee leadership and concerns about the business’s precarious future have devastated employee morale at Facebook’s parent company.While it stops short of the full encryption that other messaging services like WhatsApp have adopted, it gives Messenger a heightened mode of security that Facebook hopes will attract global audiences to download the app. On Friday, Facebook said it would also begin testing “secret conversations” inside Messenger, a feature that offers end-to-end encryption on some messages to be read only on the two mobile devices that users are communicating with. The company has added a string of features to the service, including letting people send money to friends through the app, pull up a voice or video call, or order a private car from inside the app.

That June, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, hired a PayPal executive, David Marcus, to take over Messenger and build it into a world-class competitor. And Messenger’s capabilities were so limited that you could not send friends an animated GIF of a dancing Shiba Inu, as you could with many other messaging services.īut since mid-2014, Facebook has been playing a furious game of catch-up with Messenger. Messenger often took a back seat to the limelight enjoyed by WhatsApp, the messaging app that Facebook had bought for $19 billion. Two years ago, Messenger, a photo and text messaging service, appeared to be almost an afterthought at Facebook, the social networking giant.

Messenger secret conversation