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Comment by QuantumRoar | Hacker News Reader

I rarely check my Facebook on my phone but when I do, I use their website.

But for a few days now, every time I tap on the messages icon it bounces me to the Google store app for their messenger. I literally cannot see my messages anymore!

A workaround is to change the user agent (is that the word?) by requesting the desktop site. Then, the m.facebook.com domain is a bit more tedious to use but it works and I can see my messages. The www.facebook.com domain is unusable on your phone (rescaling is completely broken and text boxes don't work on my phone, so I guess they didn't really do a good job there).

So now I'm stuck using the mobile version of their website as seen from a desktop browser.

Great User Experience!

View on HN

You can use mbasic.facebook.com to see/reply to messages and m.facebook.com for browsing facebook, that's what I do, still better than the app.

Oh great. Thanks for the pointer to mbasic.facebook.com, I didn't know about that one yet.

I discovered "Tinfoil for Facebook" some time ago. It's a good replacement for the official facebook app on Android. It's a wrapper for the facebook mobile website. It doesn't eat the battery, requires minimal permissions. It hasn't been updated in a while and that's a good thing :)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.danvelazco...

I have the same issue. I also recommend using mbasic to browse facebook and messages.

I believe that they made that move in preparation to Android Instant Apps. (https://developer.android.com/topic/instant-apps/index.html)

In the future this button will most likely open the instant version of the messaging app instead of redirecting you to the store.

Wow... Thanks for pointing that out.

But I hope I can turn that off. That sounds really dangerous.

> I guess they didn't really do a good job there

Not if their goal was to make the non-mobile version of their site usable on your phone. But if their goal was to make the non-mobile version of their site unusable on your phone, they did just fine. (Why would they want to do that? To encourage people to use the mobile version. Why would they want to do that? Among other reasons, to make them use the Messenger app.)

Yeah, that's pretty conspiracy-theory-y: it implies that Facebook did something that was unequivocally bad for user experience, in order to push people into interacting with their services using the methods they prefer. But then, disabling messages in the mobile website to push people into using the Messenger app fits that description perfectly too.

It doesn't have to be a conspiracy. They provide a mobile site, so they don't test or develop the desktop site on mobile.

> that's pretty conspiracy-theory-y

I don't think that it counts as a conspiracy theory at this point. I think their intent is very clear.

Here's Facebooks strategic cookbook according to my experience and opinion:

   1. Advance into new territory
   2. Make it nice and cozy to attract enough people
   3. Fence it off and lock people in
   4. Go to step 1

Examples would be:

- Anonymity

- XMPP support for their chat

- making the time line a clusterfuck (is it actually still a _time_ line or what do the call it now?)

- the reach of public posts on business sites (unless you pay)

- the whole thing how facebook videos are treated unequal to videos from other sources (probably everything originating from facebook sources is treated as more relevant in your timeline, who knows...)

- we also have the facebook articles thing where publishers will likely leave a few kidneys behind when they try to get out of it again

The fun thing is that as soon as people feel comfortable using a certain feature, they don't really notice how they get locked in. Like a prison with walls so far you can't see them. Keep living inside and build your life and house and whatever have you. When the walls close in, you either leave everything behind or rearrange yourself according to your new overlords.

Edit: formatting

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