Facebook is completely redesigning Messenger to make it simple again

Facebook is giving Messenger a major design overhaul, promising a much simpler and cleaner user experience after years of jamming the chat app full of superfluous features like games.

“When you’re messaging, you really want a simple and fast experience,” Mark Zuckerberg said during the company’s F8 keynote. “We’re taking this moment to completely redesign Messenger to focus on these ideas.” Zuckerberg again reiterated the “clean” and “fast” nature of the revamped Messenger app before moving on in the keynote.

Messenger VP David Marcus said that the refreshed app is coming “very, very soon” and is something the team has been working on since the start of this year. It’s going to have a dark mode, which is a nice addition in our growing world of OLED smartphones.

The bottom navigation has been simplified to three central tabs that focus on communication. Icons for the camera and video chat remain present at the upper right of the app, but everything looks much more streamlined. It looks like a chat app again. I’m guessing that the number of people who’ve switched to Messenger Lite (or competing messaging apps) might’ve made Facebook realize that something had to change about the bloated mess that is Messenger today.