After months of testing and leaks, Facebook has officially begun rolling out a material design overhaul for Messenger. The company has decided to go ultimately with the more blue-ish look that was found in earlier testing builds users began noticing. This change includes a blue top bar along with a floating action button. There are also other noticeable tweaks made to the app such as no more black separators between message threads along with a more polished and cleaner appearance.
David Marcus, Vice President of Messaging at Facebook, made the announcement today via Twitter revealing to the world what the new app will look like when updated. Fortunately, I was able to get my hands on the update on my Moto E (2015) via a manual download from the Play Store. I thought that’d be worth a note since most would expect the update to come server side as that wasn’t the case with me.
Here’s some screenshots of the new UI in Facebook Messenger:
The brand new Messenger for Android, featuring material design is coming to your phone today! pic.twitter.com/qvQxZCs3bZ
— David Marcus (@davidmarcus) March 7, 2016
It’s unclear at this time what the fate of the Messenger app for iOS will be, however we can assume an update of some sort becoming available any day now.
You can download the latest version of Facebook Messenger for Android from the Play Store.
