Facebook gave users fair warning ahead of a recent change that requires people to install a separate iPhone application if they want to keep using Facebook’s messaging feature on their iPhones, but there is still plenty of outrage. So much so, in fact, that the Facebook Messenger app for iOS now has a 1-star average rating in the App Store out of spite.
But if you would rather not use a dedicated app to chat with your Facebook friends, don’t fret: A simple trick will let you keep using the main Facebook app for the iPhone to send and receive messages.
In a recent post, The Guardian noted that there is an easy loophole that allows users to continue using the chat feature in Facebook’s iPhone app. That’s the good news — the bad news is that Facebook will almost certainly prevent this trick from working in a future app update.
In the meantime, this is all you have to do in order to keep chatting in the main Facebook app for the iPhone:
- Open the Facebook app on your iPhone and tap on the Messages tab. The app will prompt you to install the dedicated Facebook Messenger app; click Install.
- On the App Store pages that subsequently opens, tap to download Facebook Messenger but stop the download after it begins.
- Go back to the main Facebook app and you’ll find that the Messages tab has been restored.
