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

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

#131

Post by zem »

chrisdbaldwin wrote: post #54

Why is anyone using Facebook for chat at all? (Real question)

because it's very well designed. it gets casual asynchronous messaging right in a lot of ways. unlike email, threads are grouped by person rather than by subject line, which makes it a lot lower friction (subject lines are for talking about something; they're a usability drawback when you're primarily talking to someone). unlike sms, you don't have to maintain a person->id mapping yourself, it's done globally and kept constantly up to date by facebook. unlike whatsapp, it's not tied to your phone; you just need to know your username and password to access it from any browser-capable device. and finally, it supports notifications via a variety of mechanisms, and even if you don't enable any of them (i don't), most people who use facebook check it regularly anyway, so you get to see the little "you have new messages" icon each time you go to read your stream.

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

#132

Post by jordonwii »

zo1 wrote: post #84
wrsh07 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

You can actually view messages on the mobile web app (or you could earlier today, anyway). On my phone, clicking on messages tells me to download messenger. If I ignore that and hit all messages, it nags again, but eventually does it.

FWIW, I discovered this because Messenger would not show me a group chat that I was added to by co-workers (who I'm not friends with on FB).

Edit: just realized you were referring to the app, not the site. My mistake.

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

#133

Post by cm2187 »

I am not a mobile app junkie, and I count the number of messaging apps on my mobile: imessage, whatsapp, kik. That's already 3, ie two too many. Then I would need to add facebook, telegram, google's latest thing, skype? I mean why not a different messaging app for each contact? Why does facebook thinks I need more messaging apps?

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

#134

Post by Ronsenshi »

lelandbatey wrote: post #112
galistoca wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Chrome on Android does support real-time push notifications. I know because I was notified of a friend's Facebook post I was mentioned in within 5 seconds of my friend posting it. I don't have Facebook installed on my phone, and he posted it from his phone while my phone was face up on the table between us and we both where surprised at how fast I was notified.

Con confirm. Worked with real time push notifications via Service Workers in Chrome myself.

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

#136

Post by wodenokoto »

codeka wrote: post #70
galistoca wrote: post #31

Earlier 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 don't care if notifications are delayed or even lost

But I hope you can imagine why a chat team does care if a technology doesn't allow them to send timely and reliable notifications.

It is often better to have no feature than a bad feature. I've never used the mobile web messenger, but if it is unreliable, only works in a few browsers, it makes sense to remove the product.

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

#138

Post by e12e »

galistoca wrote: post #31
jds375 wrote: post #11

So 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.

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…

Yeah, first they threw out xmpp, so I couldn't use my preffered messaging app, then they kill messaging in the web view, forcing me to give up messaging or move to their messaging app, with intrusive permissions. This after they've soundly established that they don't respect users, with how they mangled addressbooks with an earlier version of the fb app.

At least, since they're closing access from alternative sources, they're slowly succeeding in driving me off facebook. At least if I now have to move to an app, I'll pick one that supports end-to-end encryption (which facebook+xmpp+otr did fine, btw, until they killed it).

I wonder how quickly things will turn in the coming decades, as the incumbent network silos continue to screw users on the altar of data mining and ad revenue, and anyone can start a competing product for free (up to ~thousands of users at least, and at that point, maybe you can find a monetization strategy or get investment to keep going until your product becomes another "big thing").

As far as I can gather, XMPP is pretty much a dead end at this point, Google Wave is open, but also dead as a spec. So what'll presumably happen, is that eventually someone will find a new, sane, extensible and open protocol, and it will take over. We now know some things that other protocols were missing: easy serialization, sane hypermedia, sane extensions, sane push, sane presence, sane async and sync modes (mail and im w/server side archiving) end to end encryption, and some form of trust or other way to mitigate spam. I'm guessing it'll be json based with perhaps swappable transport. Probably should be encapsulated in message-level authenticated encryption. And it'll probably be another five years before we see it realized.

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

#139

Post by dump121 »

areyoucrazy wrote: post #73

I have stopped using Facebook (Twitter and everything social) half a decade ago. I don't use messaging apps and turn on my phone only when I really need to. Result: more free time to do interesting and productive things and people aren't bothering me as much. I have taken control of my life and I'm not being pushed around to do things based on notifications or desire for artificial status(likes, retweet, stars). Stop…

free time which now you are spending discussing about FB.

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

#140

Post by bookwormAT »

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #97
SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it's less about solving problems and more about breaking out of that web browser sandbox to siphon up more of that juicy, juicy data.

Apologies, my computer mouse malfunctioned and I downvoted you while swapping between windows, and I felt so bad about doing so I feel compelled to comment :( And I actually agree with you...

Well, I did not intent to vote that post, but now I upvoted it just to undo your mistake.
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