Facebook planning to add Messenger to main app again

Facebook's Messenger might come back to the main app, allowing users to check their feeds and messages in one go. Researcher Jane Manchun Wong was the first one to spot the new feature under the testing phase.

The Messenger app icon would still remain, but instead of a standalone app, it would direct the users to the messages inside the main Facebook app. This will bring back the similar layout we saw with the early days of Facebook. The social media giant completely removed the section making it into a different standalone app in 2014.

According to Wong, Facebook is starting to lay the groundwork for integrated messaging throughout all its services. Besides, the company also plans to unify WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram messaging apps and will be adding end-to-end encryption to avoid privacy breaches.

They will still work as standalone apps but will have the same underlying architecture. The social media goliath has thousands of developers working on this project, with an aim to make this happen by late 2019 or early 2020.

As of now, the feature seems to be in its early stages, and Wong said that the "Chats" section will only have basic text, and won't feature reactions, video chat, calls, or photos tabs. For that, "you'd still have to open the Messenger app," she said.

Besides, the company also launched a new feature called "Why am I seeing this post?" The feature explains why a post has pooped up on your news feed. The feature is similar to the 2014's "Why am I seeing this ad?" which provided information about the advertisement.