Mobile Facebook Users Forced to Download Messenger if they Want to Chat

The Facebook Messenger app has been around for a long time, but it’s not been necessary for chatting with your contacts on your mobile device. To do that, you could simply jump into your regular Facebook app and hit the messages tab—easy peasey. But not for much longer: reports are hitting the web that Facebook is forcing its users to migrate to the Messenger app whether they like it or not.

According to a post on TechCrunch, the rollout has begun in Europe today, and that over the next few weeks users the world over will start to see barriers to their messages telling them to download the Messenger app. I saw one today—but was still able to bypass it. Soon, I assume I’ll have to download it if I want access to my messages and Facebook contacts.

So what’s the reason for the forced switch? The post offers up a quote from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who explained that having messages “as a second-class thing inside the Facebook app makes it so there’s more friction to replying to messages, so we would rather have people be using a more focused experience for that.”

He’s not wrong—chatting via Facebook has never been super easy. But there is something slightly more annoying about having to open up a completely different app just to talk to your contacts.

For me, the forced move to the Messenger app may finally cause me to just stop communicating with Facebook friends on the go. I may wind up downloading the mobile version of Trillian for my phone and just collect all my contacts that way. Or should I just bite the bullet and get the damn Messenger? I mean, it doesn’t cost anything. I’ve already gotten used to segregating my contacts between Facebook and Google Hangouts anyway.

Either way, the status quo is changing! Everybody get mad now.

[Source: TechCrunch]