New Delhi: One of the biggest announcements made at the ongoing F8 - Facebook Developer Conference is the opening up of the company's Messenger app to outside developers.
Facebook had spent $22 billion last year to buy WhatsApp, a competing mobile messaging service with more than 700 million users. Ever since the acquisition, there was much speculation about how Facebook would differentiate between the two messaging services.
Now the expansion of Messenger as a platform along with plans to retain WhatsApp as a closed ecosystem has cleared the air.
A large segment of WhatsApp's audience is located in less affluent countries outside the US and western Europe, making it more likely that it won't be adding as many new tools as Messenger has, said David Marcus, who oversees Facebook's messaging products.
Most Messenger apps are installed on iPhones and top-of-the-line Android phones, which provide the processing power needed to handle a range of multipurpose tools.
WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, meanwhile, made it clear that the service has no immediate plans to open up to external developers and stressed that they were focusing on the recently released voice calling feature and on WhatsApp Web, that allows users to access the service from their desktop Web browser.
(With inputs from agencies)
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