Facebook Messenger’s desktop app is no more

RIP to Facebook Messenger’s desktop app. The autochthonal app for Mac and Windows is nary longer disposable to users arsenic of today, December 15, 2025, and existing users are being directed to the Facebook website to proceed utilizing the fashionable messaging service.

Though primitively launched astatine the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Messenger’s desktop app couldn’t grip arsenic galore video telephone participants arsenic business-focused rivals similar Zoom, didn’t connection screensharing, oregon easy-to-share URLs.

The penning was connected the partition for the app’s declining value to Meta, adjacent earlier the institution announced its shutdown plans this October.

In 2023, Facebook began merging Messenger back into the Facebook app.

More recently, the institution shifted the exertion underpinning the app’s desktop version. According to Meta’s assistance documentation, Messenger for Mac was built with Catalyst, which lets developers bring iPad apps to the Mac. That exertion has received disapproval for some developers and users — developers cited the other enactment required, portion users noticed apps’ deficiency of a autochthonal feel.

Before its Catalyst version, the Mac app was an Electron app that aboriginal migrated to a React Native Desktop app, according to a erstwhile Meta bundle engineer.

On Windows, the app transitioned to a progressive web app past year.

The downgrades apt impacted idiosyncratic request for a standalone Mac app, portion the strategy of moving Messenger backmost to Facebook suggested Meta was attempting to enactment up declining usage of its aging flagship societal network.

This fall, the institution warned users that Messenger’s desktop app would beryllium deprecated by twelvemonth end, and encouraged users to acceptable up a PIN to prevention their chat past earlier moving to the web.

People who usage Messenger without a Facebook relationship are being redirected to Messenger.com aft the shutdown, wherever they’ll beryllium capable to log successful without creating a Facebook account.

More accusation for users astir the modulation is disposable connected Facebook’s assistance center, with abstracted sections for Mac users and Windows users.