Facebook Messenger is looking to become a one-stop app for all your needs and it wants to achieve this with the help of chat bots.
This was evident at the Facebook F8 developer conference and honestly, it has been coming. Different businesses have been able to take advantage of the Facebook Messenger Platform and Business to bring their services into Messenger. At the Facebook F8, the social networking giant made it clear that chat bots are now the future of conversations.
For now, everything is still young and in fact, there are very few bots available from within the Facebook Messenger app. Furthermore, the discovery process is not the best you can imagine, however, what is now clear is that having bots is the most seamless and hassle-free way of doing things online.
What bots bring is the ability to have human-like conversations with chat platforms as opposed to actually speaking to one. A lot of the things that people actually make calls for can be executed with the help of bots. Most companies that are actually realizing the benefits of bots are service providers, something that we’ve seen Uber take advantage of with its integration into the Messenger app.
Will bots succeed at killing apps?
Many businesses are trying to build apps in order to reach out to their mobile audience. This has been working quite well; however, the idea of having volumes of apps installed on a single device is becoming a concern for many smartphone users. For starters, there are issues to do with storage space. The huge number of installed apps also results in cluttered phones.
With this in play, companies have been finding it hard to convince people to download and install their apps. The good side of the story is that Facebook is aware of this problem and it’s willing to help. Rather than force users to install apps on their devices, the social networking giant feels bots have a better offering. In short, you don’t need to have a standalone app installed on your phone in order to use the bot associated with the services of the said app. This is an easier way to get people to access your service than convincing them to download your app.
Facebook Messenger and its chat bots want to kill standalone apps. With the app already accessible to more than 800 million users, it presents business entities with a huge audience they probably need for their services.
But will Facebook Messenger really succeed at eliminating standalone apps? Well, it might kill standalone apps, but it won’t kill apps in general. This is true because even the bots created are apps; it’s just that they are not as complicated and sophisticated as the native apps. Rather than run locally on the phone like native apps, chat bots will run remotely in the cloud.