Congratulations, Facebook: You may have found a way to annoy your user base even more than Google did with Google+. Facebook’s decision to strip the chat functionality from its mothership mobile app and instead force users to use the separate Facebook Messenger app to chat with friends has predictably led to a big backlash as iPhone owners have been bombing Facebook Messenger with one-star reviews in the App Store for the past several days.
Predictably, many of the one-star reviewers have trashed Facebook for making them download the app in the first place, as they said they were perfectly happy chatting with the standard app.
“When will Facebook reactivate chat within the Facebook app?” asked one. “I absolutely refuse to download another app just so I can chat on Facebook with my phone. I would rather just not send and receive messages at all. Matter of fact, I may just choose to stop using Facebook all together.”
“Let’s just list a few of the worst things about this app,” wrote another. “This app is forced for all people who use Facebook on their phones, immobilizing us from messaging friends until we have downloaded this app.”
As of this writing, the latest version of Facebook Messenger has an average — yes, an average — of one star on the App Store while earlier versions of the app averaged four stars. It’s pretty clear that then you tell people they have to use an app they’ve never used before, they won’t be very happy about it.
