Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Nixes Access To Chats Outside Of Messenger Walled Garden (arstechnica.co.uk)
Tom Mendelsohn, reporting for Ars Technica: Some smartphone users of Facebook are reporting that they're no longer able to access their messages from the mobile site, and that they're being directed towards the free content ad network's dedicated Messenger app. Users of the regular Facebook mobile app were shunted over to Facebook Messenger to access their chats a while ago. Now, folk who access the service on their phone's Web browsers, or via third-party apps such as Tinfoil or Metal, are beginning to find that they can no longer view their messages. Complaints are popping up from users who are being told by Facebook that "your conversations are moving to Messenger." Some Android users are even finding themselves automatically redirected to the download link on the Google Play store when they try and view their messages on the mobile site.
You use a free service you have to accept their structure and design. Seriously, I'm tired of all the bitching about Facebook, don't like it, don't use it.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The apps are huge battery hogs - Facebook on Android is one of the worst offenders. Removing it virtually doubled my battery life.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
Their mobile site nice and lightweight. It's not the best, but it's been way ahead of their app for usability for some time now. The push to update their app weekly has turned it into a bloated, unnavigable kludge.
When it installing Messenger, it "needs" access to
* Identity
* Contacts
* Location
* SMS
* Phone
* Media/Photos
* Camera
* Microphone
* Wifi connection info
* Device and call info
Basically, EVERY bit of sensitive data on my phone. There was a recent radio broadcast where they were able to determine that FB was checking your location multiple times per second (whether or not you were using the app).
So yeah, no f'ing way that PoS app is getting installed on my device.
Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, they all tried to eliminate competitors by disallowing using competing messaging systems together with theirs.
In other words, FB is working on making itself as obsolete as these market leaders once were. Took them shorter than I gave them, actually.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why not just use email?
It has none of these problems, and far more benefits.
Because email has it's own problems. Mainly spam and pseudo-spam. I completely abandoned email a couple years ago. I still have an email address but the only thing I use it for is to search for a message that someone has told me via IM/text/phone that they sent me. If someone sends me an email message without notifying me via some other method that they are sending it to me then there is a 90+% probability that I won't read it.
That being said, I also uninstalled facebook messenger from my phone because I don't want to be notified at 2am that someone sent me a message. People are generally smart enough to not have 2am phone calls or texts but facebook messenger not so much.
I am one of those people who use facebook via the web browser on my phone and not allowing messenger via the web browser will not get me to install messenger but rather will just get me to use facebook less.
also, Facebook + Messenger uses more than 700MB of storage space. Add "Pages" and you get 1 GB!
Be or ben't
I'll fake the user agent and use the desktop site. On a tablet it's ok.
The point where Facebook forces me to install software on my phone that drains my battery is the point where I stop using Facebook messenger entirely. Obnoxious but typical. I don't know why anyone is surprised at anything they do after their "real name" policy that actually puts LGBT people and abuse victims in physical danger.
Mobile sites tend to be far more secure for users than social apps (you can say "privacy" instead if you want, though many people don't understand the difference). Most social apps, like this one, want total ownership of your phone - and therefore they own you. They demand access to your microphone, camera, location, contact list, and everything else. Big Brother never got so much data. In contrast, the websites don't get access to all that stuff. Facebook doesn't pay me enough to completely give up all my privacy.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Assuming you want to use Facebook Messenger, why wouldn't you want to just use the app? I can certainly understand not wanting to use Facebook Messenger (or not wanting to use Facebook at all), but why a strong preference for using messenger through a mobile browser?
When you install the app onto your phone, you grant it certain rights, like access to your address book. Just accessing the FB mobile site through a browser stops FB from getting access to stuff you might not want them to have access to.
I remember a case a few years ago when the FB allocated FB-specific email addresses to its users. The app would actually scan through the contacts list on your phone and if it recognised the email address of one of your contacts as being another FB user it would *automatically and silently* change the email details on your phone's contacts database to use the new FB-assigned address.
Just checked mine and both apps are using 475 megs of space. This is not counting cached data. Anything over that depends on what you send such as images and so on. Cached data depends on what the user does thus can't really place blame on the app.
Removing it virtually doubled my battery life.
If the battery life savings were only virtual, that's no good to me. I need real change.
Long ago, the Facebook app wanted new permissions like access to my contacts. I didn't think they should have it, so I still don't allow the update.
Turns out I'm using Facebook version 3.9 from 2013 on my mobile (Moto Maxx/Droid Turbo). I ripped the apk with AirDroid from my older phone and installed on the new one.
The app has the messenger inside itself, instead of an independent app. With time, it stopped working and popped a message to download the independent app, until I found a guy which made an app to unblock the messenger inside my old app.
Battery life is great, I don't even see Facebook on the battery manager (I use it very few times a day).
The apps are huge battery hogs - Facebook on Android is one of the worst offenders. Removing it virtually doubled my battery life.
That's nothing....removing the Facebook app doubled my actual life.
(In truth, I never actually used Facebook or had the app installed.)
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...