Introducing Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram Windows Apps | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram Windows Apps

newsroom.fb.com

78 pointsasp2insp44 comments

The real story here is that now we know what Osmeta, the stealth startup Facebook acquired a few years ago, has been up to. Look inside the installation directory for the Messenger app, and you'll find that it's using an iOS compatibility layer. Unfortunately, that's bad news in terms of accessibility for blind users, at least in its current form; this thing isn't firing any focus events. But I'm sure that can be fixed.

Edit: I referred to the Messenger app, but the same applies to the Facebook app. The Messenger app was just the one I looked at first.

It it doing binary compatibility with iOS apps or just some cross-compilation approach?

Don't have access to a Windows machine and if this is the mentality behind getting apps on the platform, not sure there's any reason to change that.

The iOS APIs were reimplemented on Windows. The binaries are DLLs, with a few small EXEs as entry points, but the filenames make it obvious what's going on.

I did that for running iOS apps on Android; just recompile with another dll and the app works. It's not perfect but allows fast delivery for those clients who start with iOS and then don't really want to invest in Android (at that time) which, at least here, most of them.

Thank you for the explanation of the accessibility breakage. And i also hope that they will fix it.

Remember when all the major IM platforms supported xmpp and you could just use pidgin/adium/trillian/your client of choice for everything at once?

That was a fantastic time...

I remember it as a bunch of applications that supported half of the standards, were buggy, and had clunky fits-none-well UX

I feel that way about every windows and linux app, though. Adium on OS X was brilliantly designed. And if you didn't like the design, there were tons of skins for it.

Skinning support != user experience.

That said, Adium is one of the best designed OSS apps I've used.

Adium OTR on the other-hand had a really bad UX. So I'm happy TextSecure/Signal figured that out.

But the solution was to come up with something better, not something worse.

My current situation where I need a bunch of different apps to IM different people is a big improvement compared to those dark times.

Pidgin's facebook plugin doesn't seem to parse thumbs up or images, but works well enough other than that. Google hangouts/chat plugin works well, too.

This is exactly what I needed. Now I have a Telegram, HipChat, Slack, Skype, and now FB apps. I think my computer is complete.

Our computers must think we're absolutely insane. If they could think.

Time for the next Trilian/Adium/Pidgin.

I was a Miranda fan myself. Simple, clean native windows UI. Alternately, Winphone 7 had great twitter/fb integration for contacts, feed, and IM. I'd love to see somebody make that happen again.

Oh I remember miranda. Good old times.

Franz is the closest I've seen to that recently: http://www.meetfranz.com/. It supports Slack, WhatsApp, WeChat, HipChat, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Google Hangouts, GroupMe, Skype amongst others.

What's the value of it though? It's just a bunch of webviews. I can accomplish the same with opening the web versions in my browser.

Not having to navigate to the browser, no fear of accidentally closing the browser, no tracking cookies set in the browser, native notifications.

Shame they're rolling out separate Windows 10 desktop and Windows 10 phone Facebook apps. One would think this would have been a great opportunity for a high profile example of how to do a Universal Windows Platform app.

Curious if these were built with the recently revealed React Native for UWP: https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/04/13/react-nati...

What does a Facebook app offer over just giving the website notification permissions in Chrome or Firefox?

Personally, I like being able to Cmd+tab to commonly-used chat apps. Really hard to have a conversation (while doing other stuff) when you have to Cmd+tab to Chrome, and then find the tab.

Vimium helped me with this - the `T` shortcut opens an omnibar that searches your open tabs for the text you're entering. It's still two-part, but it's keyboard shortcut + text search instead of visually identifying the correct tab and clicking on it.

You can just move the "tab" to it's own window :)

But then it's Cmd+`

Worse, it's Cmd+Tab to _a_ Chrome window (maybe you get lucky) and only then Cmd+` to cycle through Chrome windows.

I can see some value to a chat app, not least to hold your presence to online. It's the app for the rest of it and the Instagram app that have me confused

In general is there a good browser extension or something for a "browser chat tab" that you keep open and don't want to manage as a normal browser tab/window? With a pulse-on-change feature?

Could be a good use case for tab pinning, I suppose. Not quite what you're looking for though.

Chrome->File->Create Application shortcut does this. Or is that not what you're looking for?

I would personally love it if Chrome tabs showed up in Spotlight. Then, ⌘+Space "slack" would either open up the app or the tab, no sweat. :-)

There is a plugin for Alfred where you can search/switch to a tab on all open browsers. Works on FF/Chrome/Chromium/Safari.

So you need an app because OS X's window manager is terrible.

The window manager is not semantically aware that a particular tab in a particular window in a particular browser is the canonical navigation target for switching to a particular app.

A first class platform-native app provides this.

We can move tabs to new window. In that the task switcher will be able to go to the window directly.

I agree with the sentiment. Also typing 'facebook' into the address bar of FireFox the first result will be to switch to the facebook tab.

Unfortunately they chose to make Instagram a phone-only app. I don't understand why Instagram ignores non-phone devices.

This looks like a trend for certain types of services that focus on users active predominantly on a tablet and/or smartphone. I am assuming that these services usually turn a profit via monetisation of advertising 'eyeballs' or user data acquisition and sales, and that losing a small percentage of users who want to use their service with a browser are less profitable.

WhatsApp seems similar in that regard.

I am not particularly interested in these apps, but I am starting to see a disturbing pattern where parts of the internet are being segregated by operating system and the willingness to install and run software (apps) instead of accessing on-line services with a web browser or via open protocols (e.g., IMAP or XMPP).

Putting my highly pessimistic privacy hat on, this gives (and has the potential to give) Facebook a lot more information than a web browser would:

* The ability to serve ads without being blocked by a browser based ad-blocker.

* The ability to use its own web view to open web pages and have more tracking of the user's activities.

* Read through all the browser histories and caches that exist on the system to get a good picture of what the user does online.

* Read email files (if not encrypted) on the system to get more information about who the user corresponds with, subjects, etc.

* Read the entire filesystem and probably upload interesting looking file metadata on to their servers for analysis.

* Read what other applications are in use, at what times, for how long they retain focus, etc., building a (somewhat) complete profile of how the user spends time while one of the FB apps is not in focus.

* Get to know all the locations the user uses the computer at and also get more information about the networks (wired or wireless) that the user uses.

* Is a key logger possible with an application on Windows 10???

* Perhaps many more things I've missed...

The above points are slightly similar to what the smartphone apps already have (although the privileges vary across smartphone OSes and versions - not everything applies to all of them).

It would seem strange for anyone who cares about privacy but needs to use Facebook (yes, that sounds like an oxymoron) to use an official app from a privacy breaking company instead of a browser with extensions to thwart tracking and to block ads.

In the interest of all of humankind, I can only hope these apps get neglected by the users, get abandoned and die a quick death!

P.S.: All the points above apply to any program you run on your computer, but these points become more disturbing when it's related to a company like Facebook.

These new apps are UWP based so a lot of things, such as access to the whole file system, running processes, etc. is not possible as the app is sandboxed.

Thanks for pointing that out. I wasn't aware of this. This makes things better on several points I listed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com