Meta announced in July 2026 that artificial intelligence is helping the company build and launch consumer apps faster, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg telling investors during the company’s second-quarter earnings call that more new products are on the way.
The disclosure came during a Wednesday call in which Zuckerberg pointed to a recent wave of releases: Instagram Instants, a photos app; Forum, a standalone app for Facebook Groups; Seller, a standalone app for Marketplace sellers; a vibe-coded gaming app; and an experiment involving AI bedtime stories. “I expect it to become a lot easier to ship new apps,” Zuckerberg said. “So we are planning to build out more ideas and use our recommendation systems to scale them.”
The driving force, according to Meta executives, is large language models. CFO Susan Li told investors that LLMs are making existing recommendation systems smarter by better understanding content and generating improved training data. She also noted that Meta reached a milestone earlier this year: every Reel and Feed post on Instagram is now automatically processed through an LLM and analyzed for topic and tone to improve recommendations.
Meta has attempted to launch standalone apps before, with limited success. An internal incubator called Creative Labs produced apps including Slingshot, Rooms, Paper, Moments, and Riff — all of which were shut down by 2015. A second effort in the early 2020s through an R&D group called NPE Team generated more than a dozen apps, including Bump, Aux, and Hotline, none of which broke through before being shuttered.
Threads represents the company’s most recent attempt, and its clearest success to date. The app now has 500 million monthly active users, with Zuckerberg describing it as a future billion-user platform. Meta attributed part of Threads’ growth to AI-powered content recommendations.
Zuckerberg indicated that the next wave of consumer products would arrive soon, saying they were “releasing soon,” though he provided no additional details on the call.
Source: TechCrunch