Facebook is disabling messaging in its mobile web app to push people to Messenger

Facebook is removing the messaging capability from its mobile web application, according to a notice being served to users: “Your conversations are moving to Messenger,” it reads. Welcome news to the millions like me who switched to the web app in order to avoid Messenger in the first place!

At the moment, you can just dismiss the notice and go about your business. But this summer the warning will become an impenetrable wall, and your only option will be to download the official Messenger app.

There are differences in the core experiences of the desktop and mobile versions of Facebook — that’s okay! It’s perfectly fine that posts look different, you interact with things differently and certain features are absent or less easily accessed. This should be the case with messaging. Just offer plain text chat, for god’s sake, and quit it with this reach creep. Your users will thank you, and it’s really not going to hurt Messenger’s growth.


By all means, advertise Messenger on top of the message feed, or point out that some content will be missing. Messenger is more full-featured! You can do video, and stickers! Look, chatbots! But the decision to switch should be the user’s. By removing that agency, Facebook erodes a trust it should be tending to carefully.

And one more thing while we’re at it. Let us download Facebook Lite (where messaging still works, by the way)! This geo-restriction BS has got to go. Some of us have the phone equivalent of trash fires and don’t want to run that pair of hogs you call official apps.