In late August, Facebook published a piece titled “Get the Facts About Messenger”, which busted rumours that claimed the app used your smartphone’s camera and microphone at all times, while also explaining why users needed to install the controversial (and seen as unnecessary) Messenger app:
Why we’re asking people to install Messenger—We’re committed to providing a fast, reliable and fun messaging app that anyone in the world can use to reach the people who matter to them. That’s why we’re focusing just on Messenger and moving messages out of the Facebook app. People usually respond about 20% faster when they have Messenger, and we think they’ll find both apps useful in different ways. We hope you’ll try out Messenger and enjoy everything else you can do with the app, like chatting with groups and sending stickers.
This past week, the social network has been aggressively pushing this article to iOS users through the Facebook app, as this “Myths vs Facts” article has been showing as a temporarily top story, asking users to ‘Learn More’:
Facebook made a change to recently require users to install their Messenger iOS app to send and receive messages, seen as redundant when the original app worked fine. While a recent hack allowed users to bypass the install, the loophole has been recently closed.
Facebook has felt the heat from iOS users in iTunes, as reviews of the current Messenger app is flooded with angry 1-star ratings and reviews:
Did you install Messenger for iOS? What do you think about it so far?
Thanks Victoria Explorer
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I’ve found the stability to have drastically increased by switching to messenger. I’ve been using it for a year. No secret pocket pictures or recording on the internet yet……
No, I did not. I deleted Facebook off my phone instead.
I actually agree with what Facebook is doing. For many people now, a big focus (if not the main focus) is on messaging. By taking that out of the main app, and forcing it into its own app, it makes life easier. Messaging is separate. I use the Messenger app a lot more than I will ever use the actual Facebook mobile app.
it also makes messenger app much faster such as on the iphone 4, while facebook app takes forever to load, thus letting us reply quickly to messages etc
Not a fan of them forcing us to download 2 apps, but that’s my opinion. Ended up deleting both apps from my phone and I don’t plan on re-downloading either of them anytime soon.
Just use the mobile version of the site within safari. Works fine for me. Messaging works as well.
It’s also A LOT slower. Native Facebook app is much faster.
If it aint broke don’t fix it. Why would I want the hassle of having Facebook interactions spread between two different apps? No thanks.
They don’t force you on Facebook paper, and I feel its a better interface anyway.
One Facebook app is harsh on the battery.
Two Facebook apps absolutely murders it.
After being forced to download Facebook Messenger, I noticed that my battery life was awful. I decided to delete both the FB Messenger app and the main FB app and now my battery life is the best it has been since I first got the phone. I literally went from about 5 hours of usage time to about 8 hours.
I highly recommend deleting both Facebook apps and simply accessing FB via Safari, instead. Go to the website, tap the iOS share sheet (the square with the arrow pointing upward), and then tap ‘Add to Homescreen’ to gain easy access to Facebook without having to download the battery-killing Facebook apps.
If you delete all the apps off you phone, you’ll double your battery life. You do realize you can close apps right, and don’t actually to delete it? Geez.. iPhone users..
Sorry, but that’s incorrect.
The vast majority of apps don’t need to be touched because iOS handles them. Most apps don’t drain any background power because iOS has power management tools in place that freeze background applications and then shut them down entirely if they haven’t been active in a while.
Facebook is different. Facebook always stays open – even if you manually close it. The issue is that Facebook acts like a VOIP service. iOS grants certain freedoms to VOIP apps. Because VOIP always needs to be open to function, while most apps close after a period of time, iOS allows VOIP apps to stay open permanently. Facebook makes use of this ability and that uses A LOT of power. Combine this with the fact that it’s just a horribly inefficient app, and you’ve got yourself an insane battery hog.
Don’t believe me? Try it for yourself. Keep track of your battery life for a few days and then delete Facebook and keep track for a few more days. You’ll see a dramatic difference. I have about 150 apps on my iPhone. I could delete every last one of them and it wouldn’t improve my battery life as much as deleting Facebook and Facebook Messenger did.
Didn’t need to delete the FB app, just disabled its Background App Refresh access. Damn thing never seemed to work anyway; allegedly it pulls down content so when you open the app the latest stuff is immediately there, but it always refreshed anyway, so from my perspective there’s no difference. Except where I used to end the day at 20% battery life, it’s now 50-60%.
Background app refresh (BAR) is something entirely different from what I’m talking about. BAR is a function that allows the app to refresh itself at certain intervals, so that when you open the app, it will be updated to the last point that it was refreshed, rather than being all the way back at the point it was at when you last used the app.
What I’m talking about here is something different. VOIP access is not a periodic service that gets refreshed to keep things up to date; it is a service that is continually connected, regardless of whether you have BAR turned on or off. In fact, I had BAR already disabled for Facebook, but deleting the app still resulted in significant battery improvements because it meant that the constant VOIP access was no longer present on my iPhone.
As soon as the FB app started pushing it’s messenger app i realized i needed to just delete the app from my phone.. I’ve just about had it with FB so the web ui in Safari on my phone works well enough.
One thing I’d like to see on their app is the messenger notification go away if you don’t have messenger installed.
No sense in showing me there’s a message waiting for me if I don’t have the app installed to read it. I know someone is going to say “but that forces you to download/install their app”. Nothing forces me to do anything, and that message will still be there when I log into my PC several hours later. If the person trying to contact me doesn’t have my phone number to send a text message, there’s probably a reason for it and their FB message can wait.
can say with absolute certainty messenger will never be on my phone
I still won’t download it!