• by Ben Frederick  @mp_benfred, January 7, 2016

Since Facebook removed the chat functionality from its main app in spring 2014, Facebook Messenger has been growing fast. The app saw a 31% increase in users in 2015, and in a blog post this morning, announced it had reached 800 million users.

David Marcus, Facebook’s head of Messenger, highlighted their 2015 accomplishments and outlined the forthcoming strategy for the over-the-top messaging service.

OTT messagers have been eating into the SMS market share in a big way in the past few years.

Marcus argues that messenger takes texting to the next level with the ability to send stickers, photos, videos, voice clips, GIFs, your location and money to people.

While person-to-person SMS may be abdicating the throne, a new type of SMS is starting to emerge: Application to person (A2P) or messages sent from enterprises or a service provider to an individual. The A2P market is forecast to grow to about $70 billion by 2020.

In the past year, Messenger increased speed, introduced Businesses on Messenger, allowed monetary transactions through the app, partnered with Uber to launch a transportation platform, and made photo sharing easier, among other upgrades.

The company also started testing a digital virtual assistant called M, a move in lockstep with many other large tech companies like Google and Amazon.

In fact, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, posted that his 2016 New Year’s goal was "to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work… You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man."