Messenger

The app nobody had to be talked into

When did you last persuade someone to sign up for a messaging app so the two of you could talk? With Messenger you never have to. It turns up with an entire social circle already inside it: people you never added, threads that stretch back years, relatives who would not download anything new under any circumstances. That one fact explains its position better than any feature list, and it’s why the app shrugs off most of the complaints made against it.

Calls, polls and the small stuff

Voice and video calling is the strongest part. Calls hold together on ordinary mobile connections, and a group call with a crowd of faces on screen stays watchable instead of collapsing into frozen squares. Voice notes send and play back without ceremony. Reactions, threaded replies, polls and the little in-chat games give a group conversation texture that stricter messaging apps never bother with, and in a family thread that stuff actually gets used rather than admired. Chat themes and nicknames sound trivial and quietly turn a thread into a place. Photos and clips send fast, and everything stays in step across a phone, a tablet and the browser without anybody setting anything up. Search through an old thread is quick enough to settle an argument about who said what, and the call history sits where you expect it rather than three menus deep.

The chat that isn’t protected by default

End-to-end encryption exists here, but it’s a choice you make per conversation rather than a property of the app. That distinction catches people out. You can sit in a thread for years, assume it behaves like the apps that encrypt everything automatically, and be wrong, because nobody ever tapped the setting that switches protection on for that particular chat. Send a photo of a document to a sibling and you’ve made an assumption you never checked. Anyone who cares should open the conversation settings and look, not guess. The app does tell you, in its own quiet way, but it tells you in a place people never visit.

The home screen is the lesser irritation, stacking Channels, Stories and AI panels over the one thing nearly everybody came for, which is a list of names. The Facebook account tie is the third: one login, two products, so trouble on either side becomes trouble on both.

Good enough for the group chat

For keeping up with people who are already reachable here, calling parents, running a group thread that never really ends, this does the job well and nothing needs changing. For messages you’d rather nobody else could read, pick something that protects every conversation by default instead of on request. The Play listing shows what permissions the current release asks for.