Almost nine years later, Meta is ready to bring them back together. "We are testing the ability for people to access their Messenger inbox within the Facebook app and you’ll see us expand this testing soon,"
Facebook head Tom Alison wrote. "Ultimately, we want it to be easy and convenient for people to connect and share, whether in the Messenger app or directly within Facebook."
When Meta removed
Messenger from the Facebook app in 2014, it said that "our goal is to focus development efforts on making Messenger the best mobile messaging experience possible and avoid the confusion of having separate Facebook mobile messaging experiences." It's unclear whether Meta has any plans to bring messaging back to the mobile browser version of Facebook. It started pushing mobile web users toward the Messenger app
in 2016. In any case, having one fewer app to juggle on your phone is probably not a bad thing. You might be able to
send messages to Instagram users from the Facebook app too.
Meta made the announcement in a
bizarrely framed blog post about Facebook's focus areas for 2023. The post seeks to assure people that "Facebook is not dead nor dying," as it now has more than 2 billion users.
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