Help me understand - why is this so bad?
Some people don't want any Facebook software in their phones for legitimate privacy reasons.
Emphasis on legitimate, Facebook is giving Google a run for their money when it comes to privacy invasion.
Facebook disabling messaging in its mobile web app to push people to Messenger
81–90 of 517 posts
Re: Facebook disabling messaging in its mobile web app to push people to Messenger
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not a FB fanboy or anything, but sometimes it is a good choice to free yourself from legacy tech burden and build for the future. The web (html documents fetched via http requests) were not built with mobile devices in mind, especially websockets. In the mobile era, all messaging is based on push notifications which must go through the device vendor (APNS or GCM), and trying to support the legacy tech in this lan…
Chrome and Firefox currently support push notifications with GCM https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API and this is a standard API other vendors are free to implement
As far as I know it's not supported on iOS. Even if Chrome had push notification on iOS I can't think of any logical reason to build a push notification inside Chrome if I were Facebook. You think Chrome is open web, but it's not. It's an app built by Google. If Facebook were to depend on Chrome push notification (which by the way doesn't even exist but for the sake of discussion let's say it does hypothetically), it would mean it's depending on Google on both Android and iOS which means when it comes to mobile Facebook MUST go through Google 100% of the time. You may say they can use Firefox, but for the same reason, why would they add one more layer of gatekeeper just to let their users communicate? You need to realize this "open web" concept is not really open anymore when it comes to mobile.
Re: Facebook disabling messaging in its mobile web app to push people to Messenger
#83Simple solution: don't chat on Facebook. Reply via the web interface and tell the other person to send you an email, SMS, or Google Hangouts message.
Simple yes, practical no.
Re: Facebook disabling messaging in its mobile web app to push people to Messenger
#84So rather than fixing the problems that result in users messaging via the mobile web app instead of the messenger app, they're just going to "solve" the problem by forcing users to use the messenger app? This is why Facebook as a company doesn't have high levels of consumer trust. This will bite them in the future. Once you lose that level of trust it is extremely difficult to gain back.
"Users were messaging via the web frontend, so we fixed the glitch."
And we were doing it because Facebook was pushing their messenger app, when the normal Facebook app handled it just fine.
They just simply decided one day, oh hey let's redirect the messages page on the Facebook app to a static page saying "download messenger" and not give any access to the messages, including view-access. Even when you get a notification on your phone about a new message.
Re: Facebook disabling messaging in its mobile web app to push people to Messenger
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not a FB fanboy or anything, but sometimes it is a good choice to free yourself from legacy tech burden and build for the future. The web (html documents fetched via http requests) were not built with mobile devices in mind, especially websockets. In the mobile era, all messaging is based on push notifications which must go through the device vendor (APNS or GCM), and trying to support the legacy tech in this lan…
Chrome has perfectly acceptable push notification support. I am an occasional user of Facebook Messenger, and using the mobile website was perfect: I don't care if notifications are delayed or even lost (I'll see the messages eventually anyway). But there's no way I'm going to install a separate app for something I use maybe once a week, tops. If it stops working from the mobile website, then I just wait until I'm ba…
I'll assume, by Chrome you mean desktop Chrome. This is irrelevant to my comment. I was specifically talking about realtime push notifications via mobile devices. Also remember that your preference is just your preference, many people would want to be able to make sure their messages get seen in realtime. And Facebook probably wants that for their users too. Again, I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm just saying it's not an illogical decision. You are free to complain but it would be stupid for Facebook to keep going this way just so they can support the legacy technology.
Re: Facebook disabling messaging in its mobile web app to push people to Messenger
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chrome and Firefox currently support push notifications with GCM https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API and this is a standard API other vendors are free to implement
As far as I know it's not supported on iOS. Even if Chrome had push notification on iOS I can't think of any logical reason to build a push notification inside Chrome if I were Facebook. You think Chrome is open web, but it's not. It's an app built by Google. If Facebook were to depend on Chrome push notification (which by the way doesn't even exist but for the sake of discussion let's say it does hypothetically), it…
I'm not sure that's true; Facebook are keen users of serviceworkers and the Facebook web app provides push notifications on Chrome in Android using just that mechanism.
Re: Facebook disabling messaging in its mobile web app to push people to Messenger
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because everyone has it. And it doesn't need a phone number. So it's almost as ubiquitous as SMS, without distributing your phone number. Win-win.
So if its main selling point is being ubiquitous, why the fuck wouldn't they force everyone to the same platform?
I have the opposite question: if its main selling point is being ubiquitous, why the fuck wouldn't they want to maximize the number of ways users can access it so that it stays, you know, ubiquitous?
Re: Facebook disabling messaging in its mobile web app to push people to Messenger
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
you can turn off the bubbles...
Tyranny of the defaults goes both ways; If you're software doesn't have sane defaults, I will search for another.
That's a very weak reason not to use the messenger. You're confirming that if you want to create a good app, you should not listen to complaining users.
Judging by your comments you're not going to use the app period. You can just say so instead of creating artificial reasons which don't hold true for you anyways.
Re: Facebook disabling messaging in its mobile web app to push people to Messenger
#89Which means I will actively start steering my conversation partners to matrix.org and vector.im
Re: Facebook disabling messaging in its mobile web app to push people to Messenger
#90I only use facebook over the browser when using my phone. The facebook applications request an appalling number of permissions... never mind the general intrusiveness and battery hogging. Screw you Facebook.
Android 6 fixes this excessive need for permissions by mobile apps. You only grant permission at runtime and can withdraw it at anytime.