In
the latest news from Facebook, you can say goodbye to the messaging
feature on the mobile web application. Users are being served a notice
that reads “Your conversations are moving to Messenger”. What this means
is that now, even if you want to just view the messages, you’ll have to
download the app and not to mention agree to the long list of
‘permissions’ that come with the act of actually downloading the app.
A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to TheVerge that
stripping Messenger out of the main Facebook app is not a test, and
will at some point in the near future happen in every country. There are
a few exceptions to the new rule, however. First, lower-end Android
devices with memory constraints won’t be required to download Messenger.
Second, Windows Phone and tablet users will still see messages inside
their Facebook apps. Third, messaging will remain, for now, inside
Facebook’s newly launched news app Paper.
It
might also mean that Facebook will shrink the size of its main app,
making it work faster and at the very least clearing up a few MB’s on
your device. “Once the whole process is complete, we expect the core
apps to be faster,” the spokesperson told the news site. Admittedly,
chatting in Messenger is a far better experience than in Facebook’s main
app, but some users might be disappointed by the fact that they now
need two Facebook apps instead of one.
TechCrunch’s Devin Coldewey raises a valid point in this article when
he calls it a hostile move- if everyone in the company is constantly
saying that they want to connect the world, shouldn’t a diversity of
access options be part of that motive?
Facebook
acquired Whatsapp for $19 billion in 2014. The fact that this move
comes after an acquisition of mammoth proportions makes it obvious that
Facebook is committed to upping its messaging game plan. This is only
the next logical move for Facebook, given the fact that Messenger excels
in some countries where WhatsApp does not.
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