Facebook Messenger Gets A Dark Mode However Tricky

Facebook Messenger is the first of all Facebook services to get a dark mode and this comes after months of speculation but just a few days after Facebook Messenger’s dark mode was seen on Reddit, Facebook has made the new update official on iOS and Android. You can just activate it by sending the moon emoji in a current conversation or a new message. It’s an astute ploy by Facebook to get users effectively chatting – rather than just actuating the mode by means of settings. Unlike its counterparts like Twitter, Facebook wants you to chat before you can use it and one can only wonder why.

But as Facebook put it in a blog post, “as many may have discovered, dark mode can be accessed through a hidden, limited-time only experience. Simply send a crescent moon emoji in any Messenger chat to unlock the setting and prompt to turn on dark mode.”

Facebook first talked about the Dark Mode in October as a major aspect of the Messenger 4 update, which it said would take off in stages. The update principally focussed on cleaning up the application by diminishing the number of tabs from nine to three, including the Chats tab for every one of your discussions, the People tab where you can see who’s online and the Discover tab for interfacing you with organizations. A month ago, Messenger officially got the unsend option in a 10 minute window.

Facebook has reportedly lost about 44 percent of young people aged 18-29 who have opted for other rival services including Facebook’s own Instagram. This may be one of the reasons Facebook is trying to get more of its 1.3 billion users to chat if they must use its dark mode feature which is fast becoming tech trend. 44% of young people (age 18 to 29) said they deleted the Facebook app from their phones in the last year. That’s almost four times the rate that users 65 and older deleted Facebook. “Similarly, older users are much less likely to say they have adjusted their Facebook privacy settings in the past 12 months,” Pew explains. “Only a third of Facebook users 65 and older have done this, compared with 64% of younger users”. There’s virtually no top service that doesn’t have the dark mode feature.

That said, it is still by far the biggest social media company in the world both by numbers and market value. Facebook messaging platforms WhatsApp and Messenger processed 60 billion messages a day in 2016 compared to the 20 billion SMS processed globally a in a day.