Facebook’s Messenger app has transitioned rapidly from being intolerable to being a messy compendium of bad ideas. The social network, instead of fixing the glaring issues, has been continuously piling on features. Not only it slows down your phone in some instances, it’s also known to be a battery hog. Fortunately, there are alternatives available and in this article, we will discuss some of the best ones you can try.
Messenger Lite
We begin with Facebook’s own, Messenger Lite. Facebook launched this app for emerging countries like India where low-end smartphones are relatively more popular and mobile data is limited. Messenger Lite comes with a toned down interface that drops resource-extensive features such as Messenger Day and bot integration. As a result, the app consumes much less memory and battery life. Although you’ll miss out on things such as video and voice calls, GIF playback as well. Unfortunately, Messenger Lite is only available for Android right now.
Friendly
Friendly is a free iOS and Android third-party Facebook application that embeds most of the features the main app offers in a more cultivated manner. The biggest highlight for everyone will be, of course, its relatively lightweight package in terms of both storage and RAM. Furthermore, it makes use of advanced web containers, hence you can Messenger and Facebook both in a single app unlike what the social giant offers. You, obviously, won’t be able to utilize all the standard features such as live streaming but for the majority of users, Friendly should be sufficient. This one is available for both iOS and Android for free.
Google Chrome
Yes, that browser thing on your phone is also capable of replacing Facebook’s utterly useless Messenger app. Coupled with Chrome’s notifications and the power of web apps, you can use Facebook’s website instead of the native app without any hiccups whatsoever unless of course, you’d like to use features such as live streaming or video calling as well. However, if you rely on Chrome, you can preserve an incredible amount of storage and RAM. For doing so, head over to Facebook on Chrome and tap the little lock icon on the top and turn on notifications. Next, go back and tap the three dots on the top left corner and add it to your homescreen. That’s it. Now, you have a partially functioning workaround and truth be told, I haven’t used the native Facebook or Messenger app in years thanks to this.
If you want to know more about how web apps work, check out our other, more detailed article for that.
Lite Messenger for Facebook
Another worthy Facebook client available exclusively for Android is “Lite Messenger”. This one comes with almost every other feature we talked about in the “Friendly” section, however, there’s one significant advantage with this – video calls. Yes, you can make Messenger video calls through this. Although it is not perfect, you will miss out on call notifications but they do work which is quite astonishing. Lite Messenger is entirely free of cost and you can download from the link down below.
Those were some of the worthy Facebook Messenger alternatives worth looking into. Do let us know in the comments section if we missed any good ones.