If you have been using Facebook since the early 2010s, you’d probably remember that you can access Messenger directly through the Facebook app. Then sometime in 2014, Facebook removed the ability to access your message inbox through the main app, then eventually separated them into two different apps in 2016. Fast forward to 2023, it seems that Meta is going to reintegrate Messenger back into the Facebook app.
“We are testing the ability for people to access their Messenger inbox within the Facebook app and you’ll see us expand this testing soon,” Facebook head Tom Alison said in a blog post.”Over the coming year, we’ll build more ways to integrate messaging features in Facebook.”
While this may mean that you will have one less app to worry about, the Messenger app is not going away despite Meta’s plans to reintegrate some (if not all) features back into Facebook. Instead, this move is speculated to be Meta’s way of making Facebook more competitive against TikTok–as the latter does have messaging features built into their app.
The blog post also had an interesting introduction, with Facebook assuring everyone that it “is not dead nor dying, but in fact alive and thriving with 2 billion daily active users” despite all the controversies it has faced in the past few years.