Facebook Messenger lands officially on Windows Phone

Facebook for the first time officially makes a grand entry into the Windows Phone platform by launching their coveted Facebook Messenger app today. This is the first time Facebook “officially” and “genuinely” launches an app on Windows Phone Store whereas the social-network already has a Facebook app for Windows Store. There’s a lot of confusion here and there as to why Facebook is not launching all it’s party tricks at once to both the stores but we’ll talk about that later.

The Messenger app was announced at Barcelona during MWC where Nokia unveiled it’s weird X range of AOSP Android phones. To cheer up the Lumia fans (presumably), Nokia announced the imminent arrival of two most-wanted apps (not for me), one of which is Facebook Messenger and the other being the highly popular BBM messenger from BlackBerry. Though I love Facebook Messenger, I don’t have any personal like/dislike for any other crap messenger apps like those (except for Skype which is more than just a messenger).


Let’s talk about Facebook Messenger. As Facebook carved the app with its own coders, the app looks Facebook-ish and the Messenger theme if you didn’t knew already exists in Android even though this rather new minimalistic design approach by Facebook favours more metro than more Android. It also exhibits the lists of active and non-active people from your circles on the white pages with nice circle images and icons. It is slick and it’s snappy too. Besides the clean interface and snappy performance, there isn’t much in it. Well, except for one thing.
Facebook makes a grand entry into Windows Phones.
Stickers! They were so awesome when Facebook first introduced it and had more stories to tell that emojis couldn’t. Meaning they are still popular and widely being adapted and replacing the standard emojis. They’re still heavier than emojis and still needs manual navigation to insert one rather than typing in a combination of punctuators. In any case, the presence of stickers and seamless use of these is a big bonus for the new Facebook Messenger.

Though Facebook Messenger is welcome and is incredibly better than the rest, there still isn’t much need of it if you can forget the stickers part. Windows Phone already has an in-built messenger that connects you to Facebook seamlessly. The Facebook app also has one that works quite fine. Facebook Messenger’s sole purpose is to let you chat with people without going into the “real” Facebook. That’s that.

Moreover, when you set-up Facebook Messenger for the first time, you have to go and disable Facebook Chat from People’s Hub as well as Notifications from Facebook app to prevent a collision of multiple chat notification which insanely drives you crazy if you’re chatting with so many people.

By hoping that we’ll be able to see a more integrated Facebook experience on Windows Phone soon (something Facebook-y is coming at //Build), I can only recommend you to give it a spin. You’ll like it but you got to manage it too. Besides, it’ll keep you off from most distractions of Facebook if you just want to talk with people.

You can download Facebook Messenger from the Windows Phone store for free or scan the QR code below from your phone to initiate the download.

Facebook Messenger

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