I see this as a good thing.<p>It will hopefully reduce the memory and processing the main Facebook app leaves and at the same time it will give everyone a great opportunity to ditch the Facebook messaging service in favour of the plethora of other messaging apps already installed on their devices.<p>I, for one, will stop using the Facebook messenger entirely on my phone.
This is incredibly annoying. For the last couple of months the FB app has been switching me to the messenger app every time I accidentally hit the messenger button in the middle of the bottom navbar. And every single time it nags me with a full screen interstitial asking me to turn on notifications!!! Removing all FB apps now.
If the Messenger app will work without the Facebook app this could be a good thing? I would like to know about IMs people send me, but i have no interest in the stream of adverts and status updates...
I've been using the two apps for a while now and I'm perfectly happy - the only annoying aspect is sometimes I have a little red notification counter above both apps when I receive a message.<p>The principle reason why I like the Messages app is that it's very fast to load - presumably because it isn't trying to download my friends' terrible photos and timelines and events and all the other junk that is in the main FB app.
I have tried and uninstalled Messenger a few times, it seems like a really bad user experience to be bounced out of the main app whenever you want to have a quick chat with someone.<p>Waiting for apps to multitask switch can get very irritating and I think for me it would mean I use Facebook chat less if anything.
I'm quite pleased about this actually. I find FB messenger to be annoying and I hate getting interrupted when I'm just popping into the FB app for a minute or two. This way I can leave it uninstalled entirely and check FB messages later from home.
For people like myself who have Facebook on my mobile but not the messaging app it means we now need to install it.<p>For some percentage of folks like myself that means we might start using facebook messaging more instead of using it as the messaging platform of last resort.
This is just an opportunity for Facebook to show twice as many ads as usual.<p>It's sad, but I really do feel bad for the people who use Facebook nowadays. When I have to look at the job market again, I'm really not looking forward to having to (a) sign up in the first place, (b) have that stupid like button following me around everywhere <i>again</i> and (c) have to become "friends" with people that I really don't want to see anymore.<p>And then they bought Oculus VR. Seriously?
Oh great, now there's a double whammy 40 MB + 40 MB for the stupid MqttPushService that is run twice by the Facebook and the Facebook Messenger apps.<p>Might as well not use Facebook on this 512 MB device. Why can't Facebook just implement push via GCM without sucking all the memory and wakelocks itself?