Facebook redesigns Messenger with 3 major changes

Facebook Messenger has gone through a major redesign with going from nine different tabs to three; Chats, People & Discover.

Discover would show games & a recent feature letting you chat with businesses, stories and online contacts would appear under People, and Chats would show conversations.

Formerly, the stand-alone app was found to be baffling with the tabs being one too many and the layout being jumbled. The decision of redesigning may have been affected by these reviews.

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Messenger’s Vice-President mentioned that the redesign would be a foundation to base new features on, so it may be presumed that the app may introduce more features.

The platform also may launch dark mode later; similar to YouTube’s dark mode which may make the app’s format easier on the eyes. Users can currently also choose display colors in their conversations.

The redesign does not hint any (more) efforts towards monetization, but they're currently making money off it, by showing ads in users’ inboxes & in between stories and also click-to-message ads. As for the future, the app is testing to introduce ads in Messenger Stories and probably will be announced in early 2019.

Update: The dark mode was rolled out on March 04. To use the dark mode, users will have to send a crescent moon emoji to anyone, they can even send it to themselves; after the emoji being sent, falling crescent moon emojis would appear on the screen. Following this, a pop-up would appear informing the user that the dark mode can be enabled through the app's settings menu with a toggle. If you do not see the falling crescent moon emojis, you'd have to update the app to it's latest version, restart messenger, or double-click their message.