Facebook had first introduced the facility to send SMS from Messenger for its Android users back in 2012 itself.
This SMS sending feature could display texts both in the Messenger and even in the messages app by default. But this feature was dropped in 2013 after facing friction, because of lack of popularity and they probably wanted to concentrate on ramping up the Messenger usage. However, in 2016 Messenger restarted its testing the latest version for SMS in Messenger. And now Facebook has reinstituted its support for sending SMS messages from Messenger. This facility will be available to the Android users when a new updated version of the Messenger is released.
What the officials report
The SMS feature allows the users to send text messages by using the Android smartphones. The users can now send voice messages, stickers, emojis, and share location with just an SMS. Facebook’s officials of the Messaging products team announced it over the social platform that many Android apps for texting have not evolved for messaging and so they felt the urge to make Messenger one of the best clients for sending SMS messages for the Android users. Facebook’s product manager reports that there are many other popular apps that focus more customizing the SMS messages by setting color themes etc. However, the main idea of Facebook is to provide convenience to its users. So in an attempt to give the best and a completely integrated app for sending SMS messages, Facebook Messenger now allows the users to even send stickers, voice messages and share your location by just an SMS in addition to normal texting features. So now there are even more reasons to love the Messenger with all the messages, chat heads and a lot more.
How to enable this feature on your Smartphone
All these can be done only when the users will set up their Facebook Messenger account as the default SMS texting app. This can be done by following a few easy steps and then the other SMS apps will become bombastic. Open the “Settings” panel of the Facebook Messenger app. From the list of options, select “SMS” and then activate the option for “Default SMS App”. The normal Messenger chats and the SMS messages can be distinguished by using the color coding system. The regular Facebook messenger chat conversations will be marked in a blue color, whereas the SMS message chats will be purple colored.
Though the messages will be transmitted by the SMS/MMS channels via a carrier, Facebook still claims that these SMS messages will not be sent through the company. This concept of integrating the SMS messages with the Messenger app is to make the users flock to the Facebook Messenger for every chat related activity and to make them stick to it by avoiding the usage of any other messages app. The feature is now available exclusively for Android users only and there is no word on when it will be available for the other operating systems.