Facebook Messenger’s Redesign Rolls Out

Facebook Messenger’s redesign, which was first announced at Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference last Spring, is  finally here. Both its App Store and Google Play Store listings have been updated to show the new interface, and it’s available across both operating systems, but the Messenger team has said that it might take a little time for the update to be available for everyone.

The aim of the redesign is to make the chat client simpler and to put your messages front and center once again. But despite this, it’s taken a surprising amount of time to actually see a widespread release. Following its announcement in May, the redesign had a really long rollout in October.  In fact, up till now, the only way to guarantee that you got the new update was to buy a Facebook Portal video chat device, which forced the update.

Notable features of the redesign include consolidating its nine tabs into just three and introducing a lot of clean-looking whitespace to the interface. Chats are still filled with all of the functionality that’s come to Messenger over the years, but much of this is now hidden behind a new four-dot icon. So while there’s little in the way of new features, the experience is far better oriented toward what you actually want to do when you open Messenger, which is, read your messages!

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