Facebook wants to bring back Messenger Chats back to the main app, in preparation of integrated messaging.
According to a researcher Jane Wong, Facebook is bringing back Chats to the main Facebook apps, which brings back nostalgia of how the app was before.
From the screenshots on the tweet, you can see that when she tapped on the Messenger icon at the top right corner, it open Chats and she was able to chat with someone.
This used to be the case back then before Facebook decided to spurn off it into a full blown dedicated app. People used it like how we used Twitter DMs and it was called Inbox where we could privately chat with people.
Facebook first released Messenger as its own independent app in 2011 and removed messaging from Facebook so that they force you to use Messenger itself in 2014.
This turnaround is thanks to Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of trying to unify all of Facebook’s apps so that they are seamless and are ‘useful’. He outlined that he wants a situation where we talk freely between Facebook apps while being all secure and all and this looks like a first step to this vision. Bringing back Facebook Chats in mobile will make people message privately easier without needing Messenger.