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Facebook Adds SMS Support To Messenger (techcrunch.com)
Facebook Messenger already lets you send texts to your friends and other billion people on the social network, and also make voice calls and video calls. The social juggernaut is now also introducing support for SMS messages. The move comes a day after Apple introduced several new features to its Message app. Facebook Messenger used to have SMS functionality, but it was pulled in 2013 citing low usage. The feature is currently only available on Messenger for Android. TechCrunch reports: Users on any platform can receive SMS sent through Messenger, and they won't be able to tell it wasn't sent from a standard texting app. But since Apple doesn't provide as much flexibility for developers, iOS provides no option to change your SMS client, and there are no plans to bring this Facebook feature to the iPhone.In some other news, Facebook's move to retire messaging feature from its mobile website has irked Ubuntu Phone users.
I hope Facebook, Apple, and all others closed-down, proprietary messaging protocols will fail and that open standards will win.
Can we get a merge with WhatsApp and federation with Signal? That would make a pretty damn compelling case for switching to FB Messenger (I trust them a hair more than sending messages over SS7).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
both of them?!
Stuff that... who cares??
You get headlines on every little change on every high-profile app, just because.
Once upon a timewe used to find news around here.
-><- no
Doesn't anyone remember how the Facebook messenger app used to do this before?
So in other words, now in addition to all your Facebook messages, contacts, pictures, and other data, they'll give you the option of sending all your text-message data to their servers for analytics as well...
ubuntu phone has users!?!
Apparently Facebook wants to collect those additional phone numbers which they haven't been able to get via Find My Friends.
#DeleteChrome
So 90s. We all moved to messaging over IP for a reason.
The FaceBook set are now able to send text messages? Wasn't bad enough that they were poking, prodding and, in general, annoying the F**K out of one another. Now they can like me and friend me by SMS too!!! I can just see Zuck harvesting names and phone numbers for use by his FaceBook hordes to reach out and assimilate us non-members.
Don't believe me? I recall quite clearly when FaceBook harvested data from domain registries and other sources to use in creating millions of FaceBook business pages, including one for my business, without my permission mind. Following that I was hounded to "claim my page". I did claim it and then went through all the nonsense it actually takes to delete a FaceBook account permanently.
These #%^@#$@# new-economy types have no scruples, ethics or honor.
No surprise here. Less than 20 posts and a good 1/3/rd of them already complaining about how this is just another data grab by Facebook without realising that access to contacts, phone numbers, and messages has been part of the Facebook app since the Facebook app existed.
*yawn*
Wake me when someone gets access to something they didn't have before.
Facebook app. I worked there when the decision was made that we weren't competent enough to include messenger support in our app because of the limits on the size of apps that can be downloaded/updated over cell data connections. Apple has relaxed their limits, so it is now possible for even an incompetent company to have enough room to add the chat back. It reflects poorly on them that they just can't seem to make it work.
Most of the employees that worked on chat in the iOS app have been fired so adding it back would be hard.
It's annoying as hell when the Facebook app tells you that you have a message, but it no longer supports displaying the message!
That team was let go so it would be hard for them to get that feature working again.
Other features were deemed more important than fixing chat. Fixing it is not even on our roadmap.
And after how they were treated, my roommate was one of them, they'll never be able to talk those employees into returning.
real gay talk.
They want your voice pattern too. Computers profile voices very easily. Eventually they just tell you what to do.
I'm advising anyone of importance to contact me through other channels. I have Tinfoil forced to desktop mode so I can see anything sent to me.
I had pondered forcibly enabling messenger in the Facebook APK (for Android), but I really don't want to rely on Facebook corporate anymore. I need to move away from their network.
I've never advised anyone to load fb-messenger, and I never will.
The Facebook messenger is by for my most RAM hungry app I had. It makes my entire phone (a HTC One that's only a year old) extremely sluggish to use. Uninstalling it makes everything else run smoothly again. The messenger apparently needs to be running all the time and consume all that RAM even if I haven't used it in days. The Facebook app (not the messenger) is the second most hungry RAM eater. Remove both for a lightning fast phone.
I really wonder what crazy stuff is going on inside those apps to make them use that much memory. All other messaging apps do fine with much less.
I use android, but don't want to install Facebook Messenger, or indeed any Facebook apps, on my phone. I was happy enough just using the mobile web site for the few times I used Facebook. There are enough scare stories, true or not, about Facebook that I don't want anything they wrote running on my phone.
Since they started on this campaign to try to force you to install the messenger app (opening up the Google Play store every time you opened a message) they eventually annoyed me enough to close down my Facebook account. It's not as if they are removing the messenger functionality from their site - my understanding is that it will remain on the desktop site. For me this was a final straw. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
....my phones have already been able to do that. So WTF would I want to do that from the FB app (which I don't use)?
A couple of years ago, I was very hopeful that open chat protocols would win - we had Google Talk, WhatsApp, etc. using XMPP (the Jabber protocol) behind the scenes. Some allowed federation (server-to-server connections, allowing inter-network messanges), some didn't. Google was opening libJingle for open source voice (and video?) chats. The demise of closed chat networks seemed imminent.
But somehow, everything went backwards, and now we have dozens of competing IM networks, all with their own incompatible apps and protocols, competing for users, yet again.
Anyone have an idea how that happened?