Facebook is testing voice and video calling from its main app. The feature aims to reduce the need to switch between Facebook and its standalone Messenger service.
As Bloomberg reports, users in several countries, including the US, can now make video and voice calls without leaving Facebook—a perk for some and a needless add-on for others.
Once built into the core Facebook platform, Messenger was turned into a separate app in 2014, and later as a website interface. Last year, the social network merged it with Instagram. Now it’s returning some functions to the original program, though Facebook suggested to The Verge that “for a full-featured messaging, audio, and video call experience, people should continue using Messenger.”
This is the latest move in an effort to integrate all Facebook apps and services, including WhatsApp, Portal, and Oculus—all of which offer voice and video calls.
“You’re going to start to see quite a bit more of this over time,” Connor Hayes, director of product management at Messenger, told Bloomberg, describing Messenger as the “connective tissue for people to be together when apart, regardless of which service they’re choosing to use.”
Some critics argue that this makes it more difficult to break up Facebook, which was hit last week with an antitrust lawsuit intended to force the company to spin off its Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions.
The social network last year introduced CatchUp, a pilot from Facebook’s NPE (New Product Experimentation) Team that helps users stay in touch by showing when family and friends are available for a chat. The app never quite made it off the ground, but highlights the firm’s eagerness to expand from visual into audio.
