So it finally happened to me. I opened Facebook on my phone this morning, coffee not even finished, and instead of my normal feed I got a full-screen message telling me I could no longer send or read messages inside the regular app. If I wanted to talk to anyone I had to go download Messenger. Not "recommended." Not "try our new app." A wall. Take it or leave it.
I've been putting this off for weeks. I'd heard from a couple of friends that this was rolling out to them and figured I'd get lucky and skate by on the old combined app forever, the way you always think the software update that breaks everything will somehow skip your phone. It didn't skip mine. So there I was at 7:40 in the morning, thumbing through the App Store, downloading yet another icon onto a homescreen that's already a mess of icons I never asked for.
And look, I get the argument. I've read the same pieces everyone else has this week about how splitting messaging out makes the main app lighter and lets them build chat features faster without dragging the whole blue elephant along with it. Fine. Sure. Whatever the reasoning, from where I'm sitting it just feels like being told my back door is getting bricked over and from now on I have to use the side entrance, and also the side entrance wants access to my camera, my contacts, and apparently the ability to send texts on my behalf. I read the permissions list before I hit install and had a genuine moment of "wait, why does a chat app need this."
I'm not going to pretend this is some huge injustice. It's an app. I downloaded it. Life goes on. But it's a good example of something that's been bugging me for a while now, which is how little say we actually get in how these things work once enough of our friends are already on the platform. Facebook chat wasn't even that good to begin with, honestly. It dropped messages, it never synced read receipts right between the website and the phone, and half the time it would show someone as "active 2 hours ago" when they'd clearly been on the whole time. I don't have some grand nostalgia for it. I just don't love being handed an ultimatum before I've had breakfast.
Small tangent, because I can't help it: this is the same week I've been reading about how rough things have been over at Microsoft's phone division, the old Nokia team, after that huge round of layoffs got announced a couple weeks back. Tens of thousands of jobs, a big chunk of it landing right on the hardware side that used to be Nokia. It's a weird contrast to sit with, one company forcing an app onto hundreds of millions of phones in a single push, while another company that used to make actual phones is shedding people by the thousand. The phone business in 2014 is not a gentle place to work, on either end of it.
Anyway. Messenger is installed now. I'll adapt, everyone always does, that's basically the whole story of using the internet for the last however many years, you get mildly annoyed, you grumble to nobody in particular on your blog, and then two weeks later you forget you were ever annoyed and it's just how things are. I give it about ten days before I stop noticing the second icon.
One genuinely nice thing though, purely on the interface side: the actual chat heads and threads in the new app do feel snappier than the old bolted-on version ever did. Scrolling through old conversations doesn't hang the way it used to. So there's that. Small mercies.
If you haven't been hit with the wall yet, it's coming. Might as well get the download over with before you actually need to message someone urgently and discover the hard way that the old button just doesn't work anymore.