Introducing Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram Windows Apps

http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/04/introducing-facebook-messenger-and-instagram-windows-apps/

by asp2insp • 10 years ago

78 44 10 years ago

newsroom.fb.com

electic• 10 years ago

This is exactly what I needed. Now I have a Telegram, HipChat, Slack, Skype, and now FB apps. I think my computer is complete.

Aelinsaar• 10 years ago

Our computers must think we're absolutely insane. If they could think.

hengheng• 10 years ago

Time for the next Trilian/Adium/Pidgin.

Pxtl2• 10 years ago

I was a Miranda fan myself. Simple, clean native windows UI. Alternately, Winphone 7 had great twitter/fb integration for contacts, feed, and IM. I'd love to see somebody make that happen again.

davewongillies• 10 years ago

Franz is the closest I've seen to that recently: http://www.meetfranz.com/. It supports Slack, WhatsApp, WeChat, HipChat, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Google Hangouts, GroupMe, Skype amongst others.

takno2• 10 years ago

What does a Facebook app offer over just giving the website notification permissions in Chrome or Firefox?

gkoberger• 10 years ago

Personally, I like being able to Cmd+tab to commonly-used chat apps. Really hard to have a conversation (while doing other stuff) when you have to Cmd+tab to Chrome, and then find the tab.

ThrustVectoring• 10 years ago

Vimium helped me with this - the `T` shortcut opens an omnibar that searches your open tabs for the text you're entering. It's still two-part, but it's keyboard shortcut + text search instead of visually identifying the correct tab and clicking on it.

hjgrtrtr• 10 years ago

You can just move the "tab" to it's own window :)

takno2• 10 years ago

I can see some value to a chat app, not least to hold your presence to online. It's the app for the rest of it and the Instagram app that have me confused

Pxtl2• 10 years ago

In general is there a good browser extension or something for a "browser chat tab" that you keep open and don't want to manage as a normal browser tab/window? With a pulse-on-change feature?

gcr2• 10 years ago

I would personally love it if Chrome tabs showed up in Spotlight. Then, ⌘+Space "slack" would either open up the app or the tab, no sweat. :-)

50901• 10 years ago

So you need an app because OS X's window manager is terrible.

knight17• 10 years ago

We can move tabs to new window. In that the task switcher will be able to go to the window directly.

sixothree• 10 years ago

I agree with the sentiment. Also typing 'facebook' into the address bar of FireFox the first result will be to switch to the facebook tab.

sirkneeland• 10 years ago

Shame they're rolling out separate Windows 10 desktop and Windows 10 phone Facebook apps. One would think this would have been a great opportunity for a high profile example of how to do a Universal Windows Platform app.

MiddleEndian• 10 years ago

Remember when all the major IM platforms supported xmpp and you could just use pidgin/adium/trillian/your client of choice for everything at once?

That was a fantastic time...

JBReefer• 10 years ago

I remember it as a bunch of applications that supported half of the standards, were buggy, and had clunky fits-none-well UX

lj3• 10 years ago

I feel that way about every windows and linux app, though. Adium on OS X was brilliantly designed. And if you didn't like the design, there were tons of skins for it.

muddi900• 10 years ago

But the solution was to come up with something better, not something worse.

anonymoushn• 10 years ago

My current situation where I need a bunch of different apps to IM different people is a big improvement compared to those dark times.

Malician• 10 years ago

Pidgin's facebook plugin doesn't seem to parse thumbs up or images, but works well enough other than that. Google hangouts/chat plugin works well, too.

lewisl9029• 10 years ago

Curious if these were built with the recently revealed React Native for UWP: https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/04/13/react-nati...

mwcampbell2• 10 years ago

The real story here is that now we know what Osmeta, the stealth startup Facebook acquired a few years ago, has been up to. Look inside the installation directory for the Messenger app, and you'll find that it's using an iOS compatibility layer. Unfortunately, that's bad news in terms of accessibility for blind users, at least in its current form; this thing isn't firing any focus events. But I'm sure that can be fixed.

Edit: I referred to the Messenger app, but the same applies to the Facebook app. The Messenger app was just the one I looked at first.

Gorbzel• 10 years ago

It it doing binary compatibility with iOS apps or just some cross-compilation approach?

Don't have access to a Windows machine and if this is the mentality behind getting apps on the platform, not sure there's any reason to change that.

mwcampbell2• 10 years ago

The iOS APIs were reimplemented on Windows. The binaries are DLLs, with a few small EXEs as entry points, but the filenames make it obvious what's going on.

tyrylu• 10 years ago

Thank you for the explanation of the accessibility breakage. And i also hope that they will fix it.

kyriakos• 10 years ago

Unfortunately they chose to make Instagram a phone-only app. I don't understand why Instagram ignores non-phone devices.

Freak_NL• 10 years ago

This looks like a trend for certain types of services that focus on users active predominantly on a tablet and/or smartphone. I am assuming that these services usually turn a profit via monetisation of advertising 'eyeballs' or user data acquisition and sales, and that losing a small percentage of users who want to use their service with a browser are less profitable.

WhatsApp seems similar in that regard.

I am not particularly interested in these apps, but I am starting to see a disturbing pattern where parts of the internet are being segregated by operating system and the willingness to install and run software (apps) instead of accessing on-line services with a web browser or via open protocols (e.g., IMAP or XMPP).

newscracker2• 10 years ago

Putting my highly pessimistic privacy hat on, this gives (and has the potential to give) Facebook a lot more information than a web browser would:

* The ability to serve ads without being blocked by a browser based ad-blocker.

* The ability to use its own web view to open web pages and have more tracking of the user's activities.

* Read through all the browser histories and caches that exist on the system to get a good picture of what the user does online.

* Read email files (if not encrypted) on the system to get more information about who the user corresponds with, subjects, etc.

* Read the entire filesystem and probably upload interesting looking file metadata on to their servers for analysis.

* Read what other applications are in use, at what times, for how long they retain focus, etc., building a (somewhat) complete profile of how the user spends time while one of the FB apps is not in focus.

* Get to know all the locations the user uses the computer at and also get more information about the networks (wired or wireless) that the user uses.

* Is a key logger possible with an application on Windows 10???

* Perhaps many more things I've missed...

The above points are slightly similar to what the smartphone apps already have (although the privileges vary across smartphone OSes and versions - not everything applies to all of them).

It would seem strange for anyone who cares about privacy but needs to use Facebook (yes, that sounds like an oxymoron) to use an official app from a privacy breaking company instead of a browser with extensions to thwart tracking and to block ads.

In the interest of all of humankind, I can only hope these apps get neglected by the users, get abandoned and die a quick death!

P.S.: All the points above apply to any program you run on your computer, but these points become more disturbing when it's related to a company like Facebook.

satysin• 10 years ago

These new apps are UWP based so a lot of things, such as access to the whole file system, running processes, etc. is not possible as the app is sandboxed.

newscracker2• 10 years ago

Thanks for pointing that out. I wasn't aware of this. This makes things better on several points I listed.

Introducing Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram Windows Apps

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