So it finally happened to me. I opened Facebook on my phone Thursday night to see if anyone had responded to a thread about the drought (yeah, still a thing, my lawn is basically straw at this point) and got the full-screen wall: "Message your friends faster." Translation: your in-app chat is gone now, go download Messenger or you can't talk to anyone.
I'd been putting this off for weeks. I know a bunch of you already got pushed into this back in the spring if you're in certain test markets, but it hit a lot of us in the US only in the last couple weeks, and this week is when it stopped being optional for me. There's no "not now" button anymore, just a grayed-out message box and an arrow pointing at the App Store.
Fine. Downloaded it. It's not that big a deal, 35-ish megs, installs in under a minute on the office wifi. And honestly, once it's on your phone, it's a perfectly decent messaging app. Chat heads (that little circle that pops up over whatever app you're in when someone messages you) are actually kind of clever, even if the first time it happened I thought my phone was glitching. Message delivery feels faster than the old bolted-on chat inside the main app ever did, which, fine, I guess is the point.
What's been bugging me isn't really the app itself, it's the week of my Facebook feed being absolutely clogged with people reposting that chain-letter-style warning about Messenger's permissions. You've probably seen it: some version of "Messenger asks for permission to use your camera and microphone AT ANY TIME without your confirmation, WARN YOUR FRIENDS." I counted eleven separate people in my feed share some variant of that post on Tuesday alone. My aunt shared it with three exclamation points in the caption. It's not accurate, or at least it's wildly overstated (the permissions list is mostly standard boilerplate any messaging app needs to, you know, let you send a photo or record a voice message), but nobody wants to be the guy who fact-checks his aunt in the comments. So I just quietly didn't share it and moved on with my day, which felt like the coward's way out and also the only sane option.
The bigger annoyance for me, and this is a small complaint but it's mine, is that now I've got two Facebook icons on my home screen instead of one. My phone's home screen was already a mess of half-used apps I keep meaning to delete (looking at you, some flashlight app I definitely did not need to download separately), and now there's a second blue icon sitting right next to the first one. I get the technical argument, chat is a fundamentally different kind of app than a feed, different notification needs, different battery behavior, all that. I don't love it as a user though. It's one more thing to update, one more thing to get a "new version available" badge on, one more login state to keep track of if I ever have to reinstall.
None of this is a crisis. People will adjust in about a week and then forget the old way ever existed, the same way nobody misses the old Photos app after iOS 7 changed everything, or however many redesigns Gmail has been through since I started this blog. That's just how this stuff goes now. But I'll say this: if you're one of the people still holding out, still poking at that grayed-out message box hoping it comes back, it's not coming back. Just install the thing. It's not spying on you through your microphone while you sleep, whatever your cousin posted says. It's just an app that sends texts, badly disguised as something scarier because that's what gets shared 400 times before lunch.
I do wonder how many of these "here's the new mandatory companion app" moments we're going to get from these platforms before it stops being a story. Feels like it's happening more often lately, not less.