Facebook is bringing Messenger back to its mobile app after almost nine years, as part of the social media giant’s push to become more competitive with rival app TikTok. The move aims to make it easier for people to connect and share, according to Facebook head Tom Alison, who said in a blog post that the company is testing the ability for people to access their Messenger inbox within the Facebook app, and that it plans to expand this testing soon.
The decision to remove Messenger from the Facebook app in 2014 was part of Meta’s goal to focus development efforts on making Messenger the best mobile messaging experience possible and avoid the confusion of having separate Facebook mobile messaging experiences. However, the return of Messenger to the Facebook app shows that the company is once again aping a competitor to stay relevant.
Meta’s strategy to shift Facebook away from a friends and family app to an entertainment and discovery platform also includes plans to make Facebook the best place for social discovery and sharing. The company is attempting to enable users to share what they discover on Facebook via messaging, without needing to switch to another app. This is a key reason why Messenger is returning to the Facebook app, according to Alison.
Meta made the announcement in a blog post about Facebook’s focus areas for 2023, seeking to assure people that the platform is not dead nor dying, as it now has more than two billion users. However, the blog post’s framing of the announcement was described as bizarre by some observers, as it seems to suggest that Facebook’s future is not in friends and family connections, but in becoming more like TikTok.
It remains unclear whether Meta has any plans to bring messaging back to the mobile browser version of Facebook, but users will no doubt welcome having one fewer app to juggle on their phones. They might also be able to send messages to Instagram users from the Facebook app too, as a result of the change.
