Facebook Has Taken Away The Mobile Messenger Workaround

There was previously a great way for you to check your Facebook messages without actually using Facebook messenger on your phone. It’s not completely dead, but that method has just intentionally been made super inconvenient.

By creating a shortcut to the Facebook website on your phone, and dragging the shortcut onto your wallpaper, you could have an easy, one-touch launcher that would let you check Facebook in your browser. You might end up with 20 tabs to close at the end of the day, but it worked.

That’s great for privacy advocates like me, equal parts paranoid and lazy. We don’t want Zuckerberg listening into our conversations about our greatest fears (don’t you have those?), yet we’re too apathetic to actually *stop* using it and are fully aware there’s an NSA analyst somewhere checking up on our latest Facebook flirt. But those terms and conditions on the Messenger app? Hell no.

Now, if you try to check messages from the website on your phone, it will give you a notice on the current page that Messenger is available, and forward you to Messenger on your app store. That’s two little Xs you have to press before reading the message. Not impossible — just really annoying.

Once you’re in a conversation, you don’t have to do it again, so one could theoretically have different tabs open for people they regularly message. How much pain are you willing to endure to not get Messenger?

I suppose it’s the socially responsible thing to do to not cut out the workaround outright, just in case people are relying on the service for something important. But it also says “Soon you’ll only be able to view your messages from Messenger,” so there might be a hard cut-off coming.

If anyone knows of a new way to work around this obstacle, I’d love to hear it. Help out your fellow Gizgoers. A way to fool the browser into thinking it’s on a PC, perhaps?


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