Even though it failed to take over home screens on Android with the Facebook Home experiment, Facebook is still very much interested in the mobile ecosystem, where it plans to launch several standalone applications this year, The Verge has learned. The company issued major updates for its Messenger app on iOS and Android recently, and Instagram, still a popular photo service, has received its own update not long ago. But Facebook is not done when it comes to mobile apps.
Instead of trying to add as many features into its Facebook app as possible, the company would rather have “slick, standalone apps,” dedicated apps that work great delivering a single purpose, whether it’s messaging, photo-sharing or news-reading — a news reader app such as the Flipboard-like Paper app is rumored to launch soon. The Verge speculates that Facebook may also be interested in having standalone calendar and search apps that would further build on the Facebook Events and Graph Search features available inside Facebook, although there’s no evidence to support these claims yet.
Mark Zuckerberg will appear for the first time as a keynote speaker at the Barcelona Mobile World Congress even that takes place in late February, further proving Facebook’s growing interest in the mobile business.
