So I caved. After weeks of holding out of pure stubbornness, I installed Facebook Messenger on my phone last night, sitting on the couch at like 11pm because my friend Priya sent me something through Facebook chat and I had no way to actually read it without either logging into the mobile site (which is miserable) or finally giving in.
If you havent been paying attention, Facebook spent the last couple weeks basically forcing this on everyone. Chat used to just live inside the regular Facebook app. Now it doesnt, not on phones anyway, and if you try to tap a message thread it throws up a screen telling you to go download Messenger separately. Theyve been testing this since the spring in a few countries but it went wide at the end of July and by now its pretty much unavoidable if you use Facebook on your phone at all.
I get why theyre doing it, technically. Splitting chat into its own app probably makes both apps faster and lighter, and Messenger apparently opens quicker and handles photos better since it doesnt have to also be a news feed and a photo album and an events calendar and whatever else Facebook has bolted onto itself over the years. Fine. Thats a real, defensible engineering reason.
What got me annoyed wasnt the split itself, it was the permissions screen. When you install Messenger it asks for a pile of stuff, contacts, camera, microphone, the ability to send SMS on Android, and for about a week my Twitter feed was full of people posting screenshots of the permissions list with captions like "Facebook wants to read your texts now" and "this is basically spyware." I dont think thats quite fair, honestly, most of that access maps to actual features (send texts to non-Facebook friends, use the camera to send a photo, that kind of thing), and Android permission lists have always read scarier than what they actually do in practice. But I dont blame anyone for being suspicious of Facebook specifically. Theyve earned some of that skepticism over the years and a giant wall of permission requests dropping right as they force everyone onto a new app is bad timing at best.
Anyway. I installed it. Took maybe ninety seconds, it pulled in my existing threads without any fuss, and within about ten minutes I forgot I was mad about any of this. Thats sort of the annoying part, isnt it. The complaining is loud for a week and then everyone just quietly adapts because the alternative is not being able to talk to your friends.
One thing I will say I actually like: message read receipts and the "seen" timestamps are more reliable in the standalone app than they ever were buried in the main Facebook app. Small thing, but noticeable once youre using it daily.
This is on top of an already weird few weeks for phones in my house. My roommate ordered the Amazon Fire Phone the day it came out and has already half regretted it, mostly because the app selection outside Amazons own store is thin and Dynamic Perspective, the tilt-to-scroll gimmick, is neat for about four minutes and then just sort of sits there unused. He got it for $199 on contract through AT&T and keeps saying hell "grow into it." I dont think thats how phones work. You either like a phone in the first week or you spend the next eighteen months mildly annoyed every time you pick it up.
I also noticed Microsoft went through another huge layoff round a couple weeks back, something like 18,000 jobs, most of it tied to absorbing the Nokia devices unit they bought last year. Its a big number and it made me think about how much of "buying a company" in tech actually just means "spending a year quietly unwinding the org chart you paid for." Not really my area of expertise, but it stuck with me reading through the coverage.
Back to Messenger though, since thats really what prompted this post. Ill probably keep using it, mostly because Priya and a few other people I actually want to talk to have fully moved their conversations there and I dont love feeling like the last holdout checking a mobile browser tab. I still think forcing a second app download on everyone was a rough way to handle it, and a little more warning (or the option to just say no, keep it in one app) wouldve saved Facebook a solid week of bad press. But here I am with the icon on my home screen anyway, so I guess the forcing worked.