Facebook is considering reintegrating Messenger into the Facebook mobile app, according to a report by researcher Jane Manchun Wong.
The platform has recently forced users to download the Messenger app to chat with their friends. After that, the option to chat with friends via Chat was completely removed from the Facebook app.
Wong says that “reactions” and photo sharing options aren’t yet available in the chat, but she suggests that this could be because the app is still in development.
Facebook is unlikely to remove Messenger app downloads anytime soon. The company recently added dark mode to its Messenger app on iOS to improve its usability at night.
The Messenger app has over 1.3 billion users worldwide, giving Facebook plenty of reasons to keep it around.
What Facebook can do is offer the Chat feature as an add-on to the app, while also decompressing some of the features available in the Messenger app. This also fits perfectly with the current customer-centric policy that Facebook has been following lately.
Several people in the US Congress have begun to voice the idea of regulating content on social media sites. This notion comes after years of unchecked fake news spreading on these platforms, which is harmful to the real world.
But before this storm hits, Facebook is likely to adapt. The platform recently took a stand against the growing nationalist content on its platform. The company even analyzed the groups that will be terminated under this new rule.
It remains to be seen if all these rumors circulating in recent days will turn out to be true.
