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Meta announced two Messenger-related changes. All Facebook Messenger users will get encrypted chats later this year, while the Messenger Lite app is going away entirely.
Encrypted chats are getting a full rollout on Facebook Messenger
The company has already started expanding end-to-end encryption in Messenger, and it will complete that rollout by the end of this year. The standard was first rolled out about a year ago, to some users.
Meta said that the transition was not easy, saying that it was “an incredibly complex and challenging engineering puzzle”. The change is very welcomed, however, as every messaging service should be end-to-end encrypted.
What does that mean, exactly? Well, when conversations are end-to-end encrypted, they’re basically fully safe. Nobody can eavesdrop on them, or intercept them. Well, not even law enforcement can get ahold of them.
It is worth noting that your Messenger message history will also be encrypted. Once the rollout finishes, Messenger will finally come to the same playing field as WhatsApp, another Meta service.
The Messenger Lite app will become a thing of the past next month
That’s not all, however. Meta also announced that the Messenger Lite app is going away. This app has been available on Android since 2016, but Meta has now decided to pull the plug.
It will kill off the app in September, so next month. The exact date is September 18, in case you were wondering. Your conversation history is safe, however, as everything will still be available in (regular) Messenger.
In fact, if you go and look for that app in the Play Store now, you will not find it. It’s no longer available, unless you’ve installed it before. In other words, new users cannot see it.
Meta did not explain why this is happening. We are, however, presuming that the company wants to cut down on the number of products, on top of the fact that smartphones are plenty powerful to run the regular Messenger app these days.
It is also worth noting that Meta is looking to remove SMS support from Messenger, that change will also come next month. That was announced not long ago.
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