You need to use Facebook Messenger Lite

If you’re like me and have been avoiding Facebook Messenger for years, you need to use Facebook Messenger Lite. It’s exactly what I and so many others have been wanting from Facebook.

The rundown for Facebook Messenger Lite on Google’s Play Store (no iOS app yet) is short and sweet. Facebook says you can contact anyone on Facebook, see when they’re active, engage in on-one-one or group conversations, send different types of messages, and make voice calls over WiFi. Video calling is missing, but you have FaceTime and countless alternatives for that. The point here is that you get what you need to communicate effectively.

Unfortunately you’ll need a Facebook account to use the stripped-down version of the platform, and that’s because you lose the capability to send SMS/MMS messages. Facebook Messenger Lite is strictly for communication between people with Facebook accounts. After logging in, Facebook will check to see if you want to sync your contacts. That’s up to you. Once that’s decided, a list of conversations will appear.

Facebook Messenger Lite only has three panels: Home, Contacts, and Profile. Each is self-explanatory. Home shows who you’re talking to and offers quick access to start new conversations. Contacts shows, well, a list of people you’re friends with who have Messenger installed. And Profile is for adjusting settings, which there aren’t many of. All you can really do is tweak notifications.

It’s great that I can finally talk to people on Facebook Messenger without going through layers of extra features I don’t need. Facebook Messenger Lite actually helped me out big-time over the weekend.

A close family friend’s aunt, who’s not exactly tech-savvy, is in China for the next few weeks. She ran into a problem on her and her husband’s phones. Being that her entire family has iPhones, she reached out to me since I’ve only ever owned Android devices. How’d she get in touch? Facebook Messenger. This was pretty urgent, and I was able to start helping her within seconds. If Facebook Messenger Lite wasn’t in the U.S. yet, she would’ve been waiting until I actually saw the message on my laptop. Because I have the app installed on my Google Pixel, she and her husband had the problem fixed within minutes rather than hours. I even got a ‘thank you’ call from her through the app.

That situation of mine might be rare, but it happened. It saved her from being in a foreign country with an unusable phone, and it saved me money I would’ve been charged had she called and texted through our carriers. We also both benefited from being able to chat fast and without distractions.

We’re going to learn something as Facebook Messenger Lite rises well beyond the 50+ million installs it has on Android alone. Maybe all these companies are overthinking messaging. Do we really need to be able to play Pac-Man and talk to Kayak in Facebook Messenger? The vast majority of us probably do not.

At the end of the day, we simply want to talk to each other. Facebook Messenger Lite lets us do just that.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/10/16/you-need-to-use-facebook-messenger-lite/