Facebook Is Forcing All Users To Download Messenger By Ripping Chat Out Of Its Main Apps

by Josh Constine
TechCrunch
Apr 9, 2014

Facebook is taking its standalone app strategy to a new extreme today. It’s starting to notify users they’ll no longer have the option to send and receive messages in Facebook for iOS and Android, and will instead have to download Facebook Messenger to chat on mobile.

Facebook’s main apps have always included a full-featured messaging tab. Then a few months ago, users who also had Facebook’s standalone Messenger app installed had the chat tab of their main apps replaced with a hotlink button that would open Messenger. But this was optional. If you wanted to message inside Facebook for iOS or Android, you just didn’t download Messenger. That’s not going to be an option anymore.

Notifications about the change are going out to some users in Europe starting today, and they’ll have about two weeks and see multiple alerts before the requirement to download Messenger kicks in. Eventually, all Facebook users will get migrated to this new protocol. And you can bet some users are going to be angry.

The only way to escape the migration is to either have a low-end Android with an OS too old to run Messenger, use Facebook’s mobile web site, or use Facebook’s standalone content reader app Paper.

[…CONTINUE READING THIS ARTICLE]

[hat tip: Sylvain Henry]