In the last few weeks, the team at Facebook that works on their Messenger app for Android have been doing quite a bit of A/B testing. We saw some images of the material design redesign that Facebook Messenger might be getting. Which included a floating action button in the lower right-hand corner. And that abides by the material design guidelines. A few days later, we saw more evidence of Facebook working on some more material design aspects of the Messenger app. While that update hasn’t rolled out to everyone yet, it appears that the team is testing out some more changes to the Messenger app.
Facebook Messenger is a pretty important part of Facebook. The company has even opened it up to users that don’t have a Facebook account, all in an attempt to get more users, even if they don’t use Facebook. And the screenshots we see in this latest A/B testing continues to prove that. It looks like Facebook Messenger is opting to add in SMS capabilities. This would mean you can use Facebook Messenger as your default messaging app, in place of Hangouts, Google Messenger and the many other text messaging apps available out there.
On top of the SMS integration, it appears that Facebook is also looking to add the ability to use multiple accounts. Something that Facebook-owned Instagram just rolled out to their iOS and Android apps this week. This is great for those that have multiple Facebook accounts, allowing you to easily communicate with people through either account. The Messenger app also appears to be using a blue action bar at the top. With the rest of the app being white, it definitely fits in with Facebook’s colors, and looks good nonetheless. The status bar also gets tinted blue, to immerse you within the app. According to reports, there is another variant running around where the bottom bar in the message screen is in blue.
Lots of changes being tested right now in the Facebook Messenger app. Some of these might make it to everyone, many of these likely won’t, that’s just how A/B testing goes unfortunately. Hopefully we’ll see an update with these new material design elements rolling out soon.