How to circumvent Facebook Messenger (for now) and keep your chats in the main FB app

The recent trend to decouple key features from an app into a separate one is apparently not being regarded well by most users. Two among the more popular social-centric apps, Foursquare and Facebook, recently decided to undertake this fairly unpopular practice – while the former decoupled the check-in feature to a whole new app, called Swarm, the latter decided that its users shouldn't be able to chat from the main Facebook app anymore, but make use of the chat head-wielding Messenger instead. The latter has been allegedly gaining market share in favor of its messenger rivals, but isn't forcing it to users the main reason behind this?

Well, forced things are never highly looked upon and quite a lot of users have expressed their utter displeasure with Facebook for taking the messages away from the main app. If you're one of the distressed Facebook users, rejoice, as a workaround exists that will allow not Messenger, but your main Facebook app to handle your messages. Of course, you can always go to the mobile version of Facebook and access your messages from there, but a lot of users probably prefer to delve into one of the most popular social networks through the dedicated app.

We'll show you the ropes on how to do this, but you should have in mind that this method only works for some users. Facebook will surely find another way to force Messenger upon them in the foreseeable future, but for the time being, at least some of the users of the social network get to do things their way. Also consider that at the time of writing, said method worked on both iOS and Android for us. If it doesn't work for you, then it's probably too late.