Doodle Draw: The first game for Facebook Messenger

A few months ago Facebook enabled its own ecosystem of apps for Messenger, with most of them being utilities to send and retouch photos, although the usage spectrum is much broader, as you can see in Doodle Draw, a clone of Draw Something (and, by extension, of the Pictionary board game) that turns out to be the first game that works exclusively on Facebook Messenger.

To access the game you have two options, either directly through its icon in the device’s list of apps or in the lower context menu inside a Facebook Messenger chat window. In either case, it runs over Messenger, meaning it’s essential that you have that app installed.

You don’t have to be a genius to notice that it follows Draw Something in lockstep, including its virtual coins system to get new colors for your palette. The game is played in turns, and you can have several games active at the same time. Even if the other person doesn’t have Doodle Draw installed, you can send your drawing and a button will be automatically attached to download it.

It opens the field even more in terms of Facebook’s maneuver to create its own array of independent apps. Although the install process and distribution channel is the same as that used by other Android apps, they’re continually managing to fulfill their objective, which is to increase the number of users of Facebook Messenger. In fact, they seem to be knocking the ball out of the park after recently breaking the billion-downloads mark on Google Play.