I uninstalled the other day when I started getting notifications when someone’s story is on my feed. On messenger. That’s not a message and there is no way I found in twenty minutes of digging to turn it off. Screw that.

Agreed, this is incredibly user-hostile. As a pro-tip, you can get past it on web by telling your device to request the desktop website. They have a responsive design, so it’s actually quite usable. Just emphasizes how slimy the push to the app is, though.

Worse still is that right now my web version is telling me I have 4 messages, but my desktop one is saying I have none.

So not only hostile but incompetent.

> not only hostile but incompetent

A broken feature on the mobile version nudges towards app installation, a broken feature on the desktop version does not.

This means that there is some benefit for Facebook to not fix the mobile version.

If a bug persists and benefits the company, we should - by principle - never assume it to be a bug.

We see the same right now with reddit, where old interfaces slowly (and clearly intentionally) crumble away, permanently signalling to the user that it is time to switch to one of the interfaces with a higher ad density.

Love the tip! For me (iOS/Chrome), this seems to briefly display the newest message but then it tries to load all prior messages with that person. Am I doing something wrong? At least I can now see who sent the message!

Huh, strange. On iOS/Safari, tapping the messenger icon then requesting the desktop site takes me to my messages inbox. Surprising that it varies between browsers.

It does that for me, but then doesn’t display the latest message, or present a way to respond. Perhaps it’s because I’m on a 13 mini, which has less screen real estate? I tried rotating to landscape but that didn’t help.

Fun fact: the internal (bullshit) justification was that the Messenger install upsell counted as a message, and that's what the fake notification was for even though the same message wouldn't appear in the inbox on web.