Swiss Army knives don’t cut it on mobile. Packing in too many features creates apps that seem bloated and slow. Perhaps more than any company, Facebook has struggled to adapt its busy website to the small screen. But through a talk with Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg and its Messenger team in November, a strategy to make the social network feel lean across devices came into focus. Facebook plans to conquer mobile one app at a time.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that’s odd, considering two of Facebook’s attempts at standalone apps failed.

Facebook built its separate Camera app for shooting, filtering, and sharing photos in 2012, as it watched Instagram’s popularity skyrocketing. But then Facebook acquired Instagram before Camera even launched, and it never saw much development after that.

In December 2012, Facebook cloned Snapchat in 12 days and launched it as Poke, an app for sending self-deleting text, photos, and videos. Facebook had been interested in acquiring Snapchat, yet was rebuffed so it built its own version instead. But a lack of organic community and entrenched worries about Facebook privacy led Poke to quickly peter out, hardly putting a dent in Snapchat .

Now Facebook has given up on Camera and Poke. Though they remain available in the App Store, the company confirmed to me they’ve been depreciated and will receive no more active development.

But Facebook’s quest to build an arsenal of standalone apps is just getting started.

As CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on today’s earnings call “One theme that should be clear from our work on products like Messenger, Groups and Instagram is that our vision for Facebook is to create a set of products that help you share any kind of content you want with any audience you want.”

Wall Street seems to like the sound of that. Facebook’s share price is up 12% in after-hours trading to what would be an all-time high of $60 if it stays there until the market opens tomorrow.

Setting Messenger Free

As I drove in to Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters at 1 Hacker Way in November, I was greeted by a familiar 15-foot tall thumbs up. But for the few weeks before, the billboard at the entrance to Facebook’s campus had been emblazoned with a symbol of its future: the new Messenger icon. In case there were any doubts, launch of the completely redesigned Messenger app was big deal to the company.

For the past year, it had watched slim and stylish messaging apps explode in popularity around the world by using people’s phone books to kickstart their social graphs. WhatsApp is Messenger’s biggest and most direct competitor, and it now has 430 million users. China’s WeChat has 272 million active users thanks to growth where Facebook can’t go.  Japanese sticker-messaging app Line had 300 million as of November, and South Korea’s KakaoTalk  with its own gaming platform has 130 million users. Meanwhile, Facebook is encountering increasing competition from Google’s mobile Hangouts messenger and Twitter’s newly highlighted Direct Messages.

So Facebook set out to rebuild Messenger. In November it launched and I got a chance to sit down with its development team: Product Design Manager Luke Woods, Product Manager Peter Martinazzi, and Facebook’s Vice President of Growth and Analytics Javier Olivan. What began as a rebranded version of group messaging app Beluga, which Facebook acquired , in March 2011 had finally been given its own identity. You can watch my interview with the team at Facebook Headquarters below:

Facebook Messenger App

The design got a complete overhaul which distances it from the look of Facebook’s kludgy all-in-one main app. Gone is the heavy Facebook-blue top banner. In fact, the word “Facebook” hardly appears in Messenger at all, and its logo and navy hue have been banished too. Instead, it’s filled with breezy whitespace and simplified navigation.

Woods proudly explained to me “You can tell it’s a different app. It’s not like the old Messenger. The icon is different, the color is different. We want you to recognize this is new. And with time we’re going to make it more and more distinct, and more clear it’s a standalone product.”