Facebook Messenger will drop SMS support in September

However, recently Meta has sent a notice of discontinuation of support to users who are using Messenger to send SMS instead of the default application on the device. Accordingly, after users update the application after September 28, 2023, this integration on the Facebook Messenger application will officially disappear.

If you want to stop this feature immediately, you can do it manually by going to Settings on your phone > Applications > Default messaging app > Choose another app.

The built-in SMS sending and receiving feature instead of the default Messages app in the device was first introduced by Facebook Messenger in 2012. But just a year later, this feature was removed. In 2016, this feature was retried by Facebook under the purple theme (the default Facebook messaging theme is blue).

Currently, due to the lack of access to RCS, third-party SMS sending and receiving applications are increasingly uncommon on Android devices.

Other carriers and OEMs mainly use its Messaging app, and Google has made the default messaging feature on Android first-party.

There are still many users who are currently choosing to send and receive SMS/MMS in Messenger. However, this feature is still being discontinued by Meta because the company already has a messaging application WhatsApp to maintain.

Marvin Fry

Update 09 August 2023