Meta, the big tech owner of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, and more, has confirmed plans to fully deprecate its native Facebook Messenger application across both Windows and macOS.
As per a Meta support page (via Apple Insider), the company is phasing out these dedicated desktop apps in favor of its unified and platform-agnostic web app-based experience. For users of the PC and Mac apps, a sixty-day transition period will be allocated prior to a full service shutdown, though there’s no word on when this countdown will actually begin in earnest.
The Facebook Messenger app listing itself has been pulled from the Apple Mac App Store, though users with the app already installed on their systems can continue to use it until the end of the sixty-day grace period. Over on the Windows PC side, Meta already replaced its native Messenger app with a progressive web app (PWA) equivalent over a year ago, so the only change here is that the older native app will stop working in the near future.
On its support page, Meta recommends that all users of the older, soon-to-be-deprecated Facebook Messenger apps for desktop switch over to the PWA as soon as possible. Once the deprecation countdown begins, users can expect to receive an in-app notification prompting them to make the transition. In order to preserve chat history, the company says to enable secure storage and to set up a PIN prior to moving over to the web version.
