Facebook Messages becomes more like your inbox, Android app gets update

Look, Facebook’s had a thing for email for quite a while now. It was perhaps inevitable then that Facebook Messages would start looking and functioning a lot more like a typical inbox.

The update brings with it a two-pane layout designed to bring the feature more in line with the iOS and freshly updated Android versions. The inbox lists all the messages on the left, while a full view of all your selected conversations appears on the right.

“We know how to scale email,” Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure Jay Parikh said. “This is a scaling problem that’s well understood for two decades now. From a perspective of comparing that to what we’re doing, you’ll see that we’ve had to innovate around how to make that real-time and dynamic for our users.”

You can also navigate your inbox with keyboard shortcuts like you can on Gmail and lets you search by a sender’s name or keyword.

“With this update, it works a lot faster, it’s easier to consume things quickly. We’re trying to make everything fast,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

The giant social network’s most recent update to its Android app also features a heavy focus on the inbox. The most visible changes to the new app include the ability to upload photos and emoji directly to Messages.

It also comes loaded with the ability to create events and a new upload flow for sharing photos.