For Android (and for Windows Phone) it requires permissions to pretty much everything. It's pretty evil in that regard.

Every last permission it requests is associated with a reasonable functional requirement. It may never make use of the components it requests permission to (eg: sending and receiving SMS, which many users don't want to do with Messenger) and in newer Android versions, you can grant (or not) permissions on an ad hoc basis. Nothing 'evil' about it.

I mean, I'm looking through the permissions now and don't see anything that's not arguably needed to make it work:

- Calendar (it can set up reminders in group chats and calendar)

- Camera/Microphone (to take pictures and videos to put in group chat)

- Contacts (to get a list of contacts! Also see SMS capability below)

- Location (you can send your location in a chat)

- SMS (it can act as an SMS client as well as FB chat)

- Storage (store received pics/videos, and access existing pics/videos)

- Telephone (to detect when you get an incoming call so it can handle any active activities (think if you're already on a video call)).

And as others have noted, you can disable most of these if you don't want them on recent Android versions.

thankfully this is no longer true in newish andoird - you can disable or not grant most of the permissions

It's all related to features in the app at least, it's not like they're asking for things they don't need to make all the features work. I might call SMS unnecessary but that's because I don't really want to use it for SMS.

It's not uncommon for Android apps to ask for permissions to everything.