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Comment by benja123 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think this necessarily means anything. App download count will always favor newer apps that are still in their growth stage (TikTok is a good example of this).

Facebook is post growth stage and is probably at the point where it’s already hit, or close to hitting its peak market share. Most Facebook users have already installed the app and only ever need to reinstall it if they switch phones. Those that haven’t installed it/don’t use Facebook are unlikely to convert to new users at this point

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I don’t know—I still have a Facebook account, grudgingly, but I long ago removed the app from my phone. And I hear more and more people say that they’ve done the same. Facebook has a deeper problem than slowing user base growth. A lot of existing users view the service as a necessary evil at best, to be kept in a kind of containment.

I basically only open it to see what's happening locally, and always in a Firefox container.

It does mean exactly what you laid out here and took as obvious —- many investors and shareholders did not —- that this is an indicator that Facebook is in post-growth. This is news because as little as 12 months ago people would’ve had spirited disagreements about this, but as more evidence emerges we see more and more nails in the coffin.

Stock prices are based on future performance. A large part of the multiple is the RATE of growth. When rate of growth slows down the stock price will be down accordingly. So for all shareholders and employees things like this do matter.

Facebook in particular however is beyond the user growth phase. Everyone knows that, including investors.

Nobody expects FB to add billions of additional users, because that is close to impossible. Investors expect FB to instead defend its user base against new competitors, and to increase revenue per active user.

The p/e ratio of Meta reflects this expectation: it is conservatively low right now. If you use the distorted tech-company standards, it is even ridiculously low.

I’d be more interested to see the Messenger stats. The FB site fulfils most if not all use cases of the app, other than notifications, so it’s entirely unnecessary for an occasional user to keep it rather than just using a browser.

However, they’ve made some annoying changes to Messenger that force you to download the app for basic things like checking your marketplace messages, even if you have no desire to interact via that app.

I just switch to "view as desktop site" if I need to check messages.

that would be true if people never change their phones

that also mean young generation doesn't participate in maintaining the rate of new installs

facebook dies by demography

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