SMS integration added to Facebook Messenger

Facebook just rolled out the support for SMS messaging in the latest Android update of Messenger App, bringing back the feature that the company implemented way back in 2012 only to drop it down in 2013 because of lack of traction.The SMS integration was spotted a while back and now it has been perfected and pushed to all users with the SMS portion of the app taking a pink theme rather than the default blue theme of the messenger to signify the two different portions of the app as reported by  TechCrunch. The segregation of both the portions is not forced and intentional to avoid the chaos that will happen if at any given time people have engaged in conversation with each other on Messenger and SMS at the same time. Another important factor to take into account is the fact that SMS is expensive with standard charges applying while using it on the messenger while Facebook Messenger is much inexpensive and almost free if we take into account the cost and amount of data used. The SMS portion of the app supports rich content like Videos, Images, Stickers, Video Clips, along with locations, something that is more of an evolutionary step in SMS like what Apple unveiled in WWDC 2016 with iMessage. Additional features include everything that you can expect from the native Facebook Messenger app like using SMS via chat heads. Through more in-depth features like sending money, GIFs or making VoIP video and voice calls, one has to fall back on the Messenger part of the app. The SMS integration is exclusive to Android as Apple does not provide any flexibility in terms of what an app can do with SMS and you can’t change the default SMS app. The company stressed on the fact that it is not trying to change the behaviour of how we interact with SMS and maintained that Facebook did not process the SMS or push and store any conversations to the servers and everything was locally done.