How Facebook is trying to dominate mobile without owning your smartphone

Mobile, once Facebook's greatest flaw, is now the social network's greatest success thanks to its ownership of four of the world's most powerful apps. 

That's not enough. Now, Facebook is working on further integrating these apps to dominate your smartphone experience — while simultaneously building for the next platform.

"For a while it didn't make sense to do multiple standalone apps," said Scott Stanchak, New York Times managing director of platform operations, "but Facebook proved that theory wrong."

The numbers for the company's standalone apps are already huge. Facebook says it attracts more than 1.79 billion people per month overall. Instagram counts 600 million users per month and Messenger has 1 billion. There is some overlap in these numbers, since users can belong to more than one app, but it's a massive user base.  Read more...