Facebook is reintroducing video and voice calling to its main app
These two features are comparable to those seen in other Facebook gadgets like the Oculus virtual reality headsets and Portal video cameras.
NEW DELHI — Facebook, the largest social media platform in the world, is now testing features that will bring voice and video conversations back to the main app.
These functionalities were first split away of the company’s main app in 2011 and were formally withdrawn in 2014.
According to The Verge, these two capabilities are similar to those seen in Facebook’s other devices, such as the Oculus virtual reality headsets and Portal video cameras.
What more is coming in Facebook’s main app?
Facebook hasn’t said if it wants to bring back additional aspects of Messenger, but Messenger’s Director of Product Management told a media outlet that users are going to see ‘quite a bit more’ of this over time.
The Verge verified that the California-based business has been testing voice and video conversations in many countries, including the United States.
However, the social network did not say how many users will be able to use the services or what this means for the standalone Messenger app in the future, other than to say that people should continue to use Messenger for a full-featured chat, audio, and video call experience.
Is Messenger being incorporated into Facebook main app?
It makes about as much sense to add voice and video calling to the Facebook app as it does to spin off Messenger in the first place.
It just means you’ll have one fewer app to switch between while doing other things on your computer or phone, but it also means you’ll have to engage with, or at the very least view, Facebook along the way, which not everyone will want to do.
There’s also a chance that incorporating Messenger into Facebook may face the same backlash as combining Messenger and Instagram direct messaging. It appears to make it much more difficult to break up a massive corporation like Facebook, which may be the goal.
It’s also not the first time Facebook has contemplated integrating Messenger back into the main app. According to the Verge, Facebook experimented with bringing text conversations back with a separate inbox in 2019 and splashing “from Facebook” over Oculus, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
