Facebook
Messenger is one of the most popular instant messaging
services with nearly 900-Million active users.
Facebook has been trying to bake in new features for the messaging services at
regular intervals. Furthermore, Facebook will also be integrate the upcoming M
virtual assistant into the Messenger. And now, Facebook has
announced that it will be adding the support for SMS on
the Messenger app for Android.
The Messenger aims at becoming
your one stop shop for messaging needs and will be showing the Messenger
notifications in blue and the SMS ones in Purple. The whole idea behind this
new feature seems to be the point that Facebook doesn’t want the users to move
out of the app for any messaging needs. The caveat though lies in the fact that
one should select Messenger as the default SMS app.
SMS feature in Messenger will
extend support for text, video, images, audio, emojis and stickers. Thankfully
the SMS conversations will be kept local and will not be uploaded to the
servers. The Messages will still be sent through the cellular network. To make
use of the feature one needs to go to Facebook Messenger, select SMS and turn
on the “Default
SMS App.” We would however inform you that the roll out is
still incremental and will take some time before its implemented for all the
users.
If you
are a heavy Messenger user, this new feature can work out great for you but for
those of us not actually hooked to the Messenger it would be a not-so
compelling switch. And since you cannot uninstall the native SMS application,
it will just lie there. We also hope that the SMS feature in the Messenger app
works offline and is more of a standalone feature. On a related
note, the feature will be available only for Android since iOS doesnt
allow third party applications to access SMS.
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