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I've noticed something sneaky about Facebook on my phone. I refuse to install their apps but I do use Facebook a bit so I use it via the phone Browser (in my ca

I've noticed something sneaky about Facebook on my phone. I refuse to install their apps but I do use Facebook a bit so I use it via the phone Browser (in my case, Chrome on Android). I've noticed that sometimes Facebook shows a fake 'youve got a message' icon to try and trick you into installing their messenger app. To re-produce this behaviour: (this works best if you dont get a lot of facebook messages. Also you need a phone with no facebook apps installed) - On your desktop PC, use facebook to send a message to someone - Then switch to your phone, using facebook in the browser - After about an hour, the little speechbubble message icon at the top will go red, showing you've got a message - If you click on this from a phone browser, it redirects you to install messenger. (normally, phone-browser facebook doesnt do messenger features) - Instead of that, switch on 'request desktop site' (not sure what iOS calls this option) to make your phone display the desktop version of facebook. And then you can (usually) read your messages in the browser - But you will find that there is no new message, and the new message icon will no longer be lit up. I've had this happen five or six times now - supposedly new messages have arrived but when you look there are none. It always happens about an hour after sending a message. I'm pretty convinced its deliberate behaviour on the phone browser version of facebook to get you to install their messenger app.

andyhmltn 7y ago
I’ve noticed the same with their notifications. As of right now, I have 1 notification. I will open the menu and see there’s not actually anything there. The badge then goes away. Refresh the page and it’s there again despite not having any notifications
oceanghost 7y ago
This is absolutely a dark pattern. I sometimes install the FB app if I need to check something, but NEVER the messaging app. And the FB app will always claim I have 5 or so messages... Which of course is never actually true.
Forge36 7y ago
Mine is currently in this state. I want aware it ever stopped.
acdha 7y ago
I think simply ever having used Messenger does that - mine never shows up otherwise, even if I’ve just cleared out my messages. It reminds me of the dark pattern which got me to uninstall Messenger, where they’d send push notifications with fake alerts from your friends which when opened were simply telling you that the other person had Messenger. The net effect is that I uninstalled all of their apps and only use https://mbasic.facebook.com/ https://mbasic.facebook.com/ a few times a month
romdev 7y ago
Bookmark https://mbasic.facebook.com https://mbasic.facebook.com to get the messenger features in a readable format on smaller screens.
- Forge36 7y ago
  You beat me to it. I refuse to install the app and consistently see the fake notification. I like the smaller images too, easier to view the feed at a glance.
- anonymousab 7y ago
  There are also extensions for Firefox that disable the messenger redirect and let you use the chat interface on the normal mobile site.
rosser 7y ago
I don't think it's an attempt to get you to install messenger so much as it's a cheap tactic to drive engagement, generally. I do have Messenger installed on a device, and it also shows unread notifications for conversations where I sent the last message, a bit (I've never timed how long) after the message was sent. I assumed it was just some shitty dark pattern, that (enough) people are Pavlov-ing at unread notifications to pad their usage metrics nicely, because someone thought, "Let's poke people's brains to make the graphs look better!" or something. I mean, it is Facebook. EDIT: Phrasing
- im3w1l 7y ago
  In your case I have a different explanation. Displaying a notification and then having nothing to show for it weakens Facebook. People start thinking the notification is probably bogus and don't even click it. Maybe a short term boost, but very harmful in the long run. So then, why do they do it? I think it's because Facebook is made up of many separate teams that are trying to get ahead of each other. Some team did this and had really positive short term numbers and that got them all promoted, and then they hope nobody is able to attribute the long term loss to their team. This is Facebook creating fake engagement to scam itself.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
  FWIW this has never happened to me. It also strikes me as suboptimal even as a "dark pattern": Clicking on conversations when you have the app open already, and not seeing new messages you expect, is frustrating without any conceivable payoff for Facebook. The pattern mentioned above–the app icon showing activity, which gets you to open the app–seems far more plausible.
  - dspillett 7y ago
    I've seen in happen, particularly when switching between devices (there are times when this means I'm switching network completely, not just between devices on the same LAN) so I've assumed it is an artifact of "eventually consistency" between Facebook's many clusters and frontend nodes.
- 7y ago
familysized 7y ago
The exact same thing happens to me. Hate their messenger app too. The bad UI makes it so easy to send a message to the wrong person, and the app feels so slow and sluggish overall.
- skinnymuch 7y ago
  How can you easily send a msg to the wrong person?
Lammy 7y ago
The "message" you see the notification for is the one from Facebook telling you how super great Messenger is and how you should join your 327 friends who already installed it. Then the notification arguably-correctly goes away once you've seen the upsell message.
alexanderchr 7y ago
I don't think it's intentional. Facebook has had this bug for several years. Interestingly one of the reasons they created react/flux was to fix it: https://youtu.be/nYkdrAPrdcw https://youtu.be/nYkdrAPrdcw (15 minute mark)
- jazzyjackson 7y ago
  Well the notification icons still don't retain state no matter what device I'm on, as in, I can check my notifications, determine that nothing exciting happened, and open the app 10 minutes later and have a red icon for the same notifications. Sometimes I wonder what 1,000 programmers do all day
- fourthark 7y ago
  We had our most annoying chat bug happen over and over. Users would get an unseen count and there would be no unseen messages behind it. And everyone's sort of used to seeing one of these numbers, click on it, you get something new behind it. That's exciting. But when they get that number, they click and there's nothing there, or they refresh the page and it's gone, that's really annoying. That's really frustrating... And it wasn't like we wouldn't fix the problem. We would always fix some particular edge case. But this problem would keep coming back just because the whole system was fragile. 2014. And still not fixed. Either flux/react does not automatically fix the problem, or the fix never made it to the app. Or dark patterns.
philliphaydon 7y ago
I had that icon too and was confused because I couldn’t find any message. On the desktop Facebook site it turned out I did have a new message from someone who wasn’t a Friend. I changed the settings to disallow messages from people who aren’t friends. And never had the issue again. But I just checked and I can’t find that setting now...
dannyr 7y ago
I get something like this but on Instagram. I get a badge on Instagram saying that I have pending notifications on Facebook and there's an "Open Facebook" item in the Settings menu of the Instagram app.
daliusd 7y ago
I have messenger installed and I see the same. Honestly I think in this case it is only development team incompetence doing cache invalidation properly.
- KeytarHero 7y ago
  Yeah, this is my theory too. I use Tinfoil for Facebook on Android, and it shows I have 15 unread messages. Basically, every time I open Tinfoil while I have a new message I haven't read in Messenger, it increments, and that never gets cleared. If they were trying to drive engagement or to get you to install Messenger, why would they want the number to keep increasing well after you've caught onto the trick?
  - r3bl 7y ago
    Did you add any friends lately? Do you know those "greetings" that Facebook pushes into Messenger whenever you add a new friend on Facebook? I've recently noticed on my SO's phone that Messenger counts them as "unread messages", and the only way to clear them is to a) send that greeting, or b) clear them from a desktop. In other words, they're getting pretty desperate to drive the engagements up, and this is something that probably wasn't implemented in third-party clients. Note that this is different than a "message" on a mobile browser. Last time I've checked (admittedly, quite some time ago), there was one "message" that never gets cleared, regardless of what you do.
giancarlostoro 7y ago
Have you tried messenger.com from your browser? Edit: Just went on it. On a browser you have to enable desktop mode for login to show. Also if you login this way and disable desktop mode it forces you out. If you reenable it renders the chat. Theres no reason the chat wouldnt work on Mobile desktop mode isnt using a different browser just lying to the web server and frontend JS. Amazing. I already rarely use Facebook as it is. I might just outright stop since they are dying to infest your phone so badly.
- o-__-o 7y ago
  U s a g e S t a t i s t i c s
- dzhiurgis 7y ago
  This. This is what regulators should be concerned about.
- mattchamb 7y ago
  I actually believe part of it is that they rely on this editor[1] for the messenger and anyone who tries to use it on any device that supports IME (like phones) will find that it does not work at all. [1] https://github.com/facebook/draft-js https://github.com/facebook/draft-js
  - giancarlostoro 7y ago
    That's a library made by Facebook though... How odd, I doubt they don't have the resources to fix that problem in their own library.
  - gwillz 7y ago
    Not so much that it doesn't work at all. More like, it appears to work and then fails horribly down the road. I've been bitten by it too much. It's typically the auto-complete feature of mobile keyboards that fails. Something that you don't always see in emulators.
gambiting 7y ago
I constantly have 4 unread messages in FB messenger(as shown on the main FB page) even though there are none. It's been like this for months.
- mschuster91 7y ago
  Check your spam folder, yes FB has something like this for messages.
  - gambiting 7y ago
    I have, there is nothing, not in the spam, not in the messages from unknown people, there just aren't 4 unread messages anywhere, yet the notification persists.
reimertz 7y ago
I suggest people using https://mbasic.facebook.com https://mbasic.facebook.com. Messages work, no JavaScript, less noise.
- realshowbiz 7y ago
  Or bite the bullet and leave facebook. Your friends won’t vaporize.
solarkraft 7y ago
Their fake notifications alone are one reason to despise them. And there's so much more.
bgeeek 7y ago
I've noticed it for quite some time and thought exactly the same thing.
andy_ppp 7y ago
All these Apps now seem to do evil things to drive engagement; for example you get notifications via app icon, email, inside the app and via push notifications all at different times so for one message you might end up interacting 3+ times which can be highly irritating. It seems like buggy software but it’s actually just making you go back to your apps more often.
coblers 7y ago
I have the same setup as you and can confirm this. If I go to facebook.com from my browser, it will always show 1 unread message even though there isn't one. It's pretty annoying.
MaysonL 7y ago
This reminds me of the way Amazon will try to get you to go to smile.amazon.com when you follow an afilliate link to amazon.com.
holografix 7y ago
You can use the “request desktop version” feature on Safari and it’ll render fbook still in mobile mode but messages will be available.
Maro 7y ago
(I worked at FB, but not on this.) It's probably a bug. I use the FB apps on Android and Chrome on Win/Mac, and sometimes the notification thing goes out of sync and is stuck on "1" for a few days, and nothing seems to help. Then eventually it goes away. I'm 99.99% sure this is a some cache/consistency bug and not a trick. It's super annoying when it happens to me.
hysan 7y ago
Facebook isn't the only company to do this. I have a very,once in a blue moon, Twitter account. On the rare ocassion that I open the app, you can be sure that I'll get the red notification bubble soon after I stop using it. Open the app and are there any DMs or notifications? Nope. This pattern has happened enough times over the past few years that I finally got fed up and turned off notifications entirely last week.
Waterluvian 7y ago
LinkedIn does this too.

andyhmltn 7y ago

I’ve noticed the same with their notifications. As of right now, I have 1 notification. I will open the menu and see there’s not actually anything there. The badge then goes away. Refresh the page and it’s there again despite not having any notifications

oceanghost 7y ago

This is absolutely a dark pattern. I sometimes install the FB app if I need to check something, but NEVER the messaging app. And the FB app will always claim I have 5 or so messages... Which of course is never actually true.

Forge36 7y ago

Mine is currently in this state. I want aware it ever stopped.

acdha 7y ago

I think simply ever having used Messenger does that - mine never shows up otherwise, even if I’ve just cleared out my messages. It reminds me of the dark pattern which got me to uninstall Messenger, where they’d send push notifications with fake alerts from your friends which when opened were simply telling you that the other person had Messenger. The net effect is that I uninstalled all of their apps and only use https://mbasic.facebook.com/ https://mbasic.facebook.com/ a few times a month

romdev 7y ago

Bookmark https://mbasic.facebook.com https://mbasic.facebook.com to get the messenger features in a readable format on smaller screens.

Forge36 7y ago
You beat me to it. I refuse to install the app and consistently see the fake notification. I like the smaller images too, easier to view the feed at a glance.
anonymousab 7y ago
There are also extensions for Firefox that disable the messenger redirect and let you use the chat interface on the normal mobile site.

rosser 7y ago

I don't think it's an attempt to get you to install messenger so much as it's a cheap tactic to drive engagement, generally. I do have Messenger installed on a device, and it also shows unread notifications for conversations where I sent the last message, a bit (I've never timed how long) after the message was sent. I assumed it was just some shitty dark pattern, that (enough) people are Pavlov-ing at unread notifications to pad their usage metrics nicely, because someone thought, "Let's poke people's brains to make the graphs look better!" or something. I mean, it is Facebook. EDIT: Phrasing

im3w1l 7y ago
In your case I have a different explanation. Displaying a notification and then having nothing to show for it weakens Facebook. People start thinking the notification is probably bogus and don't even click it. Maybe a short term boost, but very harmful in the long run. So then, why do they do it? I think it's because Facebook is made up of many separate teams that are trying to get ahead of each other. Some team did this and had really positive short term numbers and that got them all promoted, and then they hope nobody is able to attribute the long term loss to their team. This is Facebook creating fake engagement to scam itself.
IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
FWIW this has never happened to me. It also strikes me as suboptimal even as a "dark pattern": Clicking on conversations when you have the app open already, and not seeing new messages you expect, is frustrating without any conceivable payoff for Facebook. The pattern mentioned above–the app icon showing activity, which gets you to open the app–seems far more plausible.
- dspillett 7y ago
  I've seen in happen, particularly when switching between devices (there are times when this means I'm switching network completely, not just between devices on the same LAN) so I've assumed it is an artifact of "eventually consistency" between Facebook's many clusters and frontend nodes.
7y ago

familysized 7y ago

The exact same thing happens to me. Hate their messenger app too. The bad UI makes it so easy to send a message to the wrong person, and the app feels so slow and sluggish overall.

skinnymuch 7y ago
How can you easily send a msg to the wrong person?

Lammy 7y ago

The "message" you see the notification for is the one from Facebook telling you how super great Messenger is and how you should join your 327 friends who already installed it. Then the notification arguably-correctly goes away once you've seen the upsell message.

alexanderchr 7y ago

I don't think it's intentional. Facebook has had this bug for several years. Interestingly one of the reasons they created react/flux was to fix it: https://youtu.be/nYkdrAPrdcw https://youtu.be/nYkdrAPrdcw (15 minute mark)

jazzyjackson 7y ago
Well the notification icons still don't retain state no matter what device I'm on, as in, I can check my notifications, determine that nothing exciting happened, and open the app 10 minutes later and have a red icon for the same notifications. Sometimes I wonder what 1,000 programmers do all day
fourthark 7y ago
We had our most annoying chat bug happen over and over. Users would get an unseen count and there would be no unseen messages behind it. And everyone's sort of used to seeing one of these numbers, click on it, you get something new behind it. That's exciting. But when they get that number, they click and there's nothing there, or they refresh the page and it's gone, that's really annoying. That's really frustrating... And it wasn't like we wouldn't fix the problem. We would always fix some particular edge case. But this problem would keep coming back just because the whole system was fragile. 2014. And still not fixed. Either flux/react does not automatically fix the problem, or the fix never made it to the app. Or dark patterns.

philliphaydon 7y ago

I had that icon too and was confused because I couldn’t find any message. On the desktop Facebook site it turned out I did have a new message from someone who wasn’t a Friend. I changed the settings to disallow messages from people who aren’t friends. And never had the issue again. But I just checked and I can’t find that setting now...

dannyr 7y ago

I get something like this but on Instagram. I get a badge on Instagram saying that I have pending notifications on Facebook and there's an "Open Facebook" item in the Settings menu of the Instagram app.

daliusd 7y ago

I have messenger installed and I see the same. Honestly I think in this case it is only development team incompetence doing cache invalidation properly.

KeytarHero 7y ago
Yeah, this is my theory too. I use Tinfoil for Facebook on Android, and it shows I have 15 unread messages. Basically, every time I open Tinfoil while I have a new message I haven't read in Messenger, it increments, and that never gets cleared. If they were trying to drive engagement or to get you to install Messenger, why would they want the number to keep increasing well after you've caught onto the trick?
- r3bl 7y ago
  Did you add any friends lately? Do you know those "greetings" that Facebook pushes into Messenger whenever you add a new friend on Facebook? I've recently noticed on my SO's phone that Messenger counts them as "unread messages", and the only way to clear them is to a) send that greeting, or b) clear them from a desktop. In other words, they're getting pretty desperate to drive the engagements up, and this is something that probably wasn't implemented in third-party clients. Note that this is different than a "message" on a mobile browser. Last time I've checked (admittedly, quite some time ago), there was one "message" that never gets cleared, regardless of what you do.

giancarlostoro 7y ago

Have you tried messenger.com from your browser? Edit: Just went on it. On a browser you have to enable desktop mode for login to show. Also if you login this way and disable desktop mode it forces you out. If you reenable it renders the chat. Theres no reason the chat wouldnt work on Mobile desktop mode isnt using a different browser just lying to the web server and frontend JS. Amazing. I already rarely use Facebook as it is. I might just outright stop since they are dying to infest your phone so badly.

o-__-o 7y ago
U s a g e S t a t i s t i c s
dzhiurgis 7y ago
This. This is what regulators should be concerned about.
mattchamb 7y ago
I actually believe part of it is that they rely on this editor[1] for the messenger and anyone who tries to use it on any device that supports IME (like phones) will find that it does not work at all. [1] https://github.com/facebook/draft-js https://github.com/facebook/draft-js
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  That's a library made by Facebook though... How odd, I doubt they don't have the resources to fix that problem in their own library.
- gwillz 7y ago
  Not so much that it doesn't work at all. More like, it appears to work and then fails horribly down the road. I've been bitten by it too much. It's typically the auto-complete feature of mobile keyboards that fails. Something that you don't always see in emulators.

gambiting 7y ago

I constantly have 4 unread messages in FB messenger(as shown on the main FB page) even though there are none. It's been like this for months.

mschuster91 7y ago
Check your spam folder, yes FB has something like this for messages.
- gambiting 7y ago
  I have, there is nothing, not in the spam, not in the messages from unknown people, there just aren't 4 unread messages anywhere, yet the notification persists.

reimertz 7y ago

I suggest people using https://mbasic.facebook.com https://mbasic.facebook.com. Messages work, no JavaScript, less noise.

realshowbiz 7y ago
Or bite the bullet and leave facebook. Your friends won’t vaporize.

solarkraft 7y ago

Their fake notifications alone are one reason to despise them. And there's so much more.

bgeeek 7y ago

I've noticed it for quite some time and thought exactly the same thing.

andy_ppp 7y ago

All these Apps now seem to do evil things to drive engagement; for example you get notifications via app icon, email, inside the app and via push notifications all at different times so for one message you might end up interacting 3+ times which can be highly irritating. It seems like buggy software but it’s actually just making you go back to your apps more often.

coblers 7y ago

I have the same setup as you and can confirm this. If I go to facebook.com from my browser, it will always show 1 unread message even though there isn't one. It's pretty annoying.

MaysonL 7y ago

This reminds me of the way Amazon will try to get you to go to smile.amazon.com when you follow an afilliate link to amazon.com.

holografix 7y ago

You can use the “request desktop version” feature on Safari and it’ll render fbook still in mobile mode but messages will be available.

Maro 7y ago

(I worked at FB, but not on this.) It's probably a bug. I use the FB apps on Android and Chrome on Win/Mac, and sometimes the notification thing goes out of sync and is stuck on "1" for a few days, and nothing seems to help. Then eventually it goes away. I'm 99.99% sure this is a some cache/consistency bug and not a trick. It's super annoying when it happens to me.

hysan 7y ago

Facebook isn't the only company to do this. I have a very,once in a blue moon, Twitter account. On the rare ocassion that I open the app, you can be sure that I'll get the red notification bubble soon after I stop using it. Open the app and are there any DMs or notifications? Nope. This pattern has happened enough times over the past few years that I finally got fed up and turned off notifications entirely last week.

Waterluvian 7y ago

LinkedIn does this too.