Facebook wants to take over all of your messaging on Android. As of today, it’s widely rolling out a feature inside Facebook Messenger that’ll allow it to handle both Facebook messages and standard SMS messages, all combined into one interface.
Most of Facebook Messenger’s fancier features can’t be used here, but — thankfully — you’ll still be able to send stickers. The only real flair here is that, like Facebook chats, SMS conversations can pop out of the app as Chat Heads and float around the screen, over top of other apps.
Chat Heads are great until your Seamless delivery pops up
This feature has been in testing since February, according to TechCrunch, and seems to have already rolled out to quite a few people. I’ve been using it for the past couple of months as my primary messaging app — there’s nothing groundbreaking about it, but I use Facebook Messenger a lot, so it’s been convenient to have all of my chats in one place. Chat Heads for text messages is neat enough, although it gets irritating closing out a floating bubble every time I get sent a two-factor authentication code.
Facebook tells TechCrunch that none of your text messages will be seen by Facebook’s servers while using this feature. Everything is happening locally on your phone, so this theoretically won’t strike any privacy concerns. Messenger won’t try to combine your text messages and Facebook messages either; the two stay separate, even if you’re messaging the same contact in two places.
With today’s release, Facebook Messenger leader David Marcus says the SMS / Messenger integration will be available to “most countries.” If you were looking for a way to let Facebook control more parts of your life, be sure to give this one a try.
