Facebook caught some heat for pushing people to use the Messenger app a few years back, but that may actually have been a kindness. Messenger was a much better app than the main Facebook client. Although, over time Messenger has become rather bloated and clunky in its own right. The head of Messenger now admits the app is too cluttered, and changes are on the way.

Facebook's plans for Messenger in the coming year are detailed in a new post by Messenger chief David Marcus. In it, he makes a number of predictions about how Messenger will be used in 2018, but only a few items are actual changes on Facebook's end. Among his general predictions, Marcus says more businesses will use Messenger for support and that "visual messaging will fully explode in 2018."

As for the clutter, Marcus doesn't have much of an excuse. He says the team just raced to add too many features without realizing how cluttered the app was becoming. Messenger used to be about sending messages, but now it has customer service bots, games, payments, and more. Facebook recently launched a "Lite" version of Messenger for developing countries, but people all over the world wanted to use it.

Marcus promises a radical clean-up operation to make the app easier to use. That might include pulling features that haven't found success and streamlining some others. Try not to get too hyped—Facebook's idea of streamlining might differ from yours.

Source: Facebook