Facebook unveiled a number of new tools for developers at its F8 2015 event, although most attention was focused on its efforts to extend the capabilities of its Messenger app.

Introducing Messenger Platform, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, said that it can be used by developers to “help people connect with the more than 600 million people who are using Messenger as they communicate every day. By opening up Messenger as a platform, we are going to be able to help people express themselves in rich new ways, make their conversations better”.

The executive noted that while there are numerous possibilities for development, the intention is to “start small”. This means enabling content from third-party apps to be shared via Messenger – a move that will also enable the company to maintain its relevance as a social platform

“All of the things different people want to share are happening in all of the different apps you are building. So in order to keep up with this future, where people are going to want to share all of these new kinds of content, we need to be able to build tools for you to enable people to share all of the different kinds of content they are producing with all of the people that they care about,” he said.

The company said that initially “with more than 40 new apps, people can enhance their conversations with GIFs, photos, videos, audio clips and more”. Where a recipient does not have the required app installed, a link is provided to the relevant app store page, which “means people can discover apps recommended by their friends, naturally through their conversations”.

Facebook’s Parse arm announced an effort targeting the internet of things (IoT) market, with Ilya Sukhar, CEO and co-founder of the business, stating: “We want to be there with you when you start experimenting with this world. We want to be there to make sure you don’t spend your time on the wrong challenges, and reinventing the wheel all over again.”

Parse unveiled a new SDK for the Arduino Yún microcontroller board and Embedded C SDKs for Linux and RTOS, to “more easily connect apps to hardware devices”.

Among the other updates made were new SDKs for iOS and Android, with simplified models for Login and Sharing which make it easier to automatically handle errors, and reduce the size of an app using the SDKs; Facebook Analytics for Apps, which offers a single place to understand an app’s audience and measure how people use it; and App Invites, which enables users to send customised invitations to friends.

Zuckerberg unsurprisingly kicked-off the event by trumpeting the size of the Facebook developer base: “We’ve doubled the size of our developer community across the whole range of Facebook services, there are now hundreds of thousands of developers building on Facebook’s tools including more than half outside of the US.”