Facebook Messenger is about to stop working on these platforms

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.

Another native PC app bites the bust

Web apps continue to take precedence on desktop

For the uninitiated, progressive web apps (PWAs for short, and also known simply as web apps), are essentially desktop websites ornamented with window dressing in order to look and feel more like dedicated software applications. PWAs have grown in popularity in recent years, with major tech backers like Google and Microsoft integrating support for them within their operating systems.

There are a number of key incentives pushing developers to opt for PWAs over traditional software applications: web app tech allows for the creation of a single, unified code base that works cross-platform, updates can be delivered server-side and without the need for individual platform approval, and maintenance is easier on the whole.

However, web apps aren’t without their problems. They tend to be relatively computationally taxing, hogging more RAM and other system resources than is the case with their native app counterparts. Anecdotally, I also find most PWAs to be slower, clunkier, and less touch input-friendly, which can likely be attributed to fewer instances of developers making platform-specific optimizations.

Generally speaking, PWAs also don’t respect native user interface elements, making for a disjointed experience that can sometimes feel ‘off.’ Thankfully, Meta’s Facebook and Facebook Messenger web apps are fairly well-crafted, with a cohesive enough design language and a UI that supports automatic and system-defined shifting between light and dark modes.

With all this in mind, I can’t help but feel disillusioned with the trend of developers — both big and small — electing to retire their purpose-built computer apps in favor of web-based alternatives. Sure, it allows for more platform agnosticism, but this comes at the cost of performance, design congruence, and overall software polish. I was disappointed when the Meta-owned WhatsApp app for PC transitioned from a native experience over to a web-based one a few months back, and I’m just as disappointed with Messenger now following suit.