Facebook has released its own separate group messaging app for Android and iOS, though initial impressions from early adopters today were overwhelmingly negative.
The social networking firm seems to be making use of messaging technology acquired from Beluga back in March and delivers messages, pictures and location details through notifications and texts.
“The Messenger app is an extension of Facebook messages, so all your conversations are in one place, including your texts, chats, emails and messages. Whether you’re on your phone or on the web, you can see the full history of all your messages,” writes Lucy Zhang on the official Facebook blog.
This, however, doesn’t seem to be going over so well with users. “This is useless and stupid,” wrote one frustrated tester. “This isn’t a chat app. It’s a separate Facebook app to let you open your messages /email. You can’t see who is online. I figured FB made this because they realized mobile chat support on their app is horrible. I was wrong. This is the opposite of what you guys needed. 1 star for effort,” he added.
Others expressed annoyance that on the Android version of the app, you can’t turn off all alerts permanently, instead having to mute them on an individual basis, or mute all for up to an hour or overnight.
“[Facebook] should just make the regular application’s chat actually work. This one would be fine if you could actually see who was online. Another poor effort. How could a company with all this “talent” be so shortsighted when making these apps? I mean, do they not use them? They should just focus on integrating it into the regular app and fix the bugs,” wrote another.
With all the criticism pouring in already, we wonder whether this Beluga buyout ends up being Facebook’s very own version of a fail whale.
