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Facebook Messenger’s redesign is finally rolling out to all

Facebook Messenger’s redesign is finally rolling out to all

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The update started its long rollout in October last year

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Image: Facebook

Facebook Messenger’s redesign, which was first announced at Facebook’s F8 developer conference last May, is finally here. Its listing on both the App Store and the Google Play Store has been updated to show the new interface, and we’ve verified that 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 entered a prolonged rollout period in October, but since then, the only way to guarantee that you get the new update has been to buy one of Facebook’s much-maligned Portal video chat devices, which forces 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 (such as games, bots, and reminders), 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.