Facebook Messenger Is Leaving the Apple Watch

Facebook Messenger is about to sail into the annals of Apple Watch apps that have been unceremoniously pulled from the wearable by their developers.

Posts began circulating on Twitter this week from folks who received a notification in Facebook Messenger on their Apple Watch telling them that the app would cease to be available at the end of this month.

The message read, “After May 31st, Messenger won’t be available as an Apple Watch app, but you can still get Messenger notifications on your watch.” While this popup only seems to have appeared for a few people, and there’s been no other official notification from the social media giant, a spokesperson confirmed the move to Reviewgeek after they reached out to Facebook for comment.

According to Facebook’s statement, “people can still receive Messenger notifications on their Apple Watch when paired, but starting at the end of May they will no longer be able to respond from their watch. But they can continue using Messenger on their iPhone, desktop and the web.” Reviewgeek notes that the spokesperson later clarified that the change would occur “at the beginning of June” rather than the “end of May.”

However, that’s a fairly subtle distinction, and the bottom line is that the Facebook Messenger app for the Apple Watch is indeed going away for good. There’s no official word on exactly why Facebook is doing this, but it’s far from alone; in fact, it’s just the most recent in a long string of high-profile developers that have sunsetted their Apple Watch apps in recent years.

This list includes Amazon, Google Maps, eBay, Slack, Target, Twitter, and Instagram. That last one is a Meta property, along with WhatsApp, which has never had an Apple Watch app. In that context, it may be more surprising that Facebook Messenger has lasted for as long as it has on Apple’s wearable.

As Facebook points out, notifications from Facebook Messenger can still be delivered to the Apple Watch, but the company isn’t doing anything special to accomplish that; any iPhone app can send its notifications to the Apple Watch — that’s been a core feature of iOS and watchOS for years. However, now you’ll need to reach for your iPhone if you want to respond to that message — no more dashing off a quick reply from your wrist.

As to the reasoning behind this decision, only Meta knows for sure. Some have speculated that Meta wants people to spend more time in the Facebook Messenger app, and the watchOS version circumvents that. It’s just as likely that the company doesn’t want to devote any more resources to maintaining or improving the app — efforts that could increase if some of the rumored changes in watchOS 10 come to fruition.

Many of the apps that previously left watchOS did so for similar reasons, although in some cases, it was simply a matter of the apps not making sense on a wrist-sized screen. When the Apple Watch was initially released in 2015, a massive tide of apps appeared for the wearable — and disappeared almost as quickly as it became apparent that things like long-form reading and extensive browsing aren’t practical on a 1.5-inch screen.

The other factor that drove many apps away was the need to turn them into standalone apps. Early watchOS apps were basically “second screen” apps running on an iPhone, similar to how CarPlay apps work today. When watchOS 2 arrived in September 2015, Apple introduced support for native apps, and by June 2016, it had announced that all new apps would have to meet this requirement. For some developers, it was easier to pull their Apple Watch app than update it, and even some who wanted to continue on the Apple Watch were forced to pull their apps for a season while they retooled them to meet the new requirements.

Of all the mainstream watchOS apps that have been put out to pasture, only one has made a significant comeback. After pulling its watchOS app in 2017 without any promises it would return, Google Maps came back to the wearable in 2020. Google Maps was arguably one of the few discontinued apps that were actually useful on the Apple Watch, so that made sense. Unfortunately, Facebook Messenger fits into a similar category, but there’s no indication that Meta is about to change its mind on this one.