Meta wants Facebook, not TikTok, to be “the best place for social discovery and sharing.”

It’s been so long since Meta cut Messenger out of Facebook’s mobile app. Almost nine years later, Meta is ready to bring them back together.

“We’re testing the ability for people to access their Messenger inbox within the Facebook app, and you’ll see us expand that testing soon. Ultimately, we want to make it easy and convenient for people to connect and share, whether in the Messenger app or directly on Facebook.”

, wrote Facebook head Tom Allison.

When Meta removed Messenger from Facebook’s app in 2014, they stated that “our goal is to focus our Messenger development efforts on making it the best mobile messaging experience possible and avoid the confusion of having separate mobile messaging experiences on Facebook”, Engadget wrote on the topic.

It’s unclear if Meta has any plans to bring messaging back to Facebook’s version for mobile browsers. In 2016, the company began pushing mobile web users to the Messenger app. In any case, it will be easier for users to use one less app.

Meta made the announcement in an oddly shaped blog post about Facebook’s focus areas for 2023. The post is meant to reassure people that “Facebook is not dead, nor dying”, as it now has more than 2 billion users.

The main reason why Meta is bringing messaging back to the Facebook app is “to make it easier for people to share what they find on Facebook, via messaging, when, where and how it fits their needs, without having to switch to another app,” Allison wrote. TikTok enables users to share videos they come across with their friends via built-in direct messages. So on the one hand, Meta is reversing direction and returning to an older way of working, but on the other, it’s emulating a competitor again.