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Comment by cornholio | Hacker News Reader

The Android Facebook messenger is pure cancer. It will hijack the default SMS application and scrape all available information to the mothership. I mostly stopped responding to Facebook messages and refuse to acknowledge it as a legitimate way to contact me.

But if you absolutely need to use the messenger, I recommend using a Hermit lite application, that hocks into the web version of the messenger and leaks no more info than any other web Facebook session.

You can use Hermit to replace many proprietary bloated apps, and even create pseudo "apps" for sites that don't feature one, like this site, with a nice icon on your desktop.

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> The Android Facebook messenger is pure cancer.

Not only that, but these apps are often installed by default on android phones and can't be removed by the user without rooting the phone. there is no guarantee Facebook is not scraping data even though the user doesn't have a Facebook account.

You can generally disable these default apps.

Which most non-technical people probably don't even think about.

I think the issue is not the Android Facebook messenger. It's Android. Because you have a platform that not only permits apps to do this, but an app store that approves apps which does this.

I am hoping to get my own data from Facebook and check it against when I switched to Windows as a mobile OS. As it stands, only two built-in apps, People and Messaging, have access to my call history.

The app store approves these apps, while at the same time denying other apps, like Adblock, that work directly against tracking. I have to void my warranty on a phone purchased at full price, with no plan, before I am allowed to install it from F-Droid.

Cue in the «soviet Russia / product sells you» jokes.

>I have to void my warranty on a phone purchased at full price, with no plan, before I am allowed to install it from F-Droid.

You don't need to root the phone to get apps from F-Droid.

Android also has absolutely useless permission categories. Supposedly lots of apps legitimately ask for "read phone status and identity" just so they can e.g. pause a game when a call comes in. The same permission lets them scrape all kinds of info like phone # and IMEI. Which is the app doing?

Android just looks like a privacy nightmare.

The Play Store team should not be permitting apps in the store without extreme skepticism of the permissions they request, particularly in certain categories.

The Facebook app should be pulled from the Play Store until its permissions are reduced, but I doubt Google will do it.

The user can always refuse access to SMS, contacts and other sensitive features on Android. I have Messenger on my Pixel, it's working fine without having access to all of that.

This is actually untrue for about half of all Android users. Being able to granularly adjust permissions is fairly new, and of course, if you aren't buying the latest phone every year, it'll be a long time until you get this.

Thank you for telling me about hermit. I've spent about 10 minutes with it and I'm already considering replacing about 5 apps with hermit versions. It has the type of functionality that IMO should really be standard in Android.

EDIT:one thing I noticed which kills a lot of the appeal for me is cookies appear to be maintained between lite apps

Not just the Android app. Facebook and Snapchat are notorious for having bloated apps: http://quellish.tumblr.com/post/126712999812/how-on-earth-th...

> You can use Hermit to replace many proprietary bloated apps, and even create pseudo "apps" for sites that don't feature one, like this site, with a nice icon on your desktop.

Do you really need another "app" for that? Why not just use a browser and save links to your home screen for the sites you want to access directly? As a bonus, you can install plugins like uBlock Origin and Decentraleyes and prevent the browser from leaking data to Google Analytics and 500 other data harvesting centers every time you load your "apps".

Maybe so you can silo cookies and the like?

I use Messenger Lite for a few years now. It's certainly not perfect, but it's… less cancer-y i guess. At least it's less bloated and doesn't hijack SMS.

Can the Hermit-wrapped web messenger send notifications?

I'm surprised more people don't know of mbasic.facebook.com

Is there any difference between that and m.facebook.com? I do use the latter on my phone to avoid installing a Facebook/Messenger app. But its usability is... limited.

mbasic runs without JavaScript. It's hard to use, but that may be a good thing.

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