Facebook Messenger Download & Updates: Payments Feature, Hiding Locations & More

Social networking giant Facebook has reached 1.44 billion monthly active users as of March 31, 2015, Facebook Newsroom notes. It has posted 936 million daily active users on average for the month of March, 798 million of which were on mobile. With this staggering statistics, it's no wonder why the Zuckerberg-led company is still the king in social media.

And this impressive feat has translated to the success of its messaging app, the Facebook Messenger. Amid recent data showing that more people still prefer SMS texts over its instant-messaging (IM) counterpart, Facebook Messenger has been consistently lording it over its peers as the most popular mobile IM app. This was the result of a new survey of 509 people commissioned by RingCentral, the CIO.com reports.

Facebook Messenger has a couple of new features up its sleeves -- the payments feature and the caller ID feature. The former makes it possible for the users to instantly receive or send money to someone in a conversation, or to other individuals in a group chat, according to Gizmodo. The user has two options in using the feature: (1) by clicking on the dollar bill icon, and (2) by typing out a dollar amount which automatically turns into a hyperlink.

The caller ID, on one hand, provide Messenger users more info on who is trying to connect with them, as per TopTechNews. "Now you'll have context about the people contacting you on Messenger with a bigger photo and more details about how you're related, and much more," Vice President of Messaging Products David Marcus says.

The feature is available on Android and iOS devices in the U.S., the U.K., France and India.

One glitch, however, of Facebook Messenger that was recently uncovered was that it tracks and reveals the user's location to everyone he or she is in conversation with. This was brought to light by Aran Khanna, a Harvard computer science student who devised a Chrome extension that plots Messenger location data, CNN Money reports.

The default setting, unknown to many users, can be turned off by clicking the compass icon just on top the "Like" button in the chat threads (Android). One can also disable the location altogether on the "Settings" tab.

For iPhone users, although the default is off, the location tracking in iOS can be disabled by going to Settings > Privacy > Location > Services and setting the option to "Never," CNN notes.

Facebook Messenger is an application that can be downloaded free for Android and iOS users.