Facebook has today announced a new feature for their hugely popular Messenger app, adding support for SMS in a bid to fully control your messaging experience.
Facebook has introduced SMS integration exclusively on Android for the launch, with support for a fairly good range of messaging features such as standard text, images, videos, and audio. You can also send ‘rich content’ including stickers, emojis, and you can also share your location. There isn’t however support for animated GIFs, or other Messenger related features like sending money, making voice or video calls, and request transportation – but since you’re in Messenger anyway those features aren’t too far away.
There’s delineation of functions, you’ll note that messages in Messenger are your usual Blue, while SMS’s are purple in the app.
To turn on SMS in Messenger, it’s pretty easy just :
- Open Messenger and tap on Settings (the person icon)
- Select “SMS” from the list
- Turn on “Default SMS app”
For the tinfoil hat brigade, Facebook isn’t getting in on the messages sent via SMS. In their announcement post, Facebook advises that they aren’t storing, uploading or send any of your SMS messages to their servers.
If you want to try it out make sure you have Facebook Messenger installed now.
Just updated and activated the SMS option. Only been using for a few hours but definitely a good experience so far.
I’m not seeing ‘SMS’ as an option in my settings after updating. Perhaps this is a staged rollout?
Likewise, it’s not in my settings just yet 🙂
Cheers