Facebook Releases Experimental Messenger App for Apple Watch

Although you can already use Facebook Messenger on your Apple Watch, it’s a pretty mundane user interface and it seems that the social media giant’s internal skunkworks group is looking at ways that they can spice up the experience to make it more geared toward the wearable experience.

The result of this so far is a new “experimental” app called Kit, which is short for “Keep in Touch” and designed to leverage Facebook Messenger to help you stay in contact with your closest friends.

The app is available from the Apple Watch App Store. Note that it’s a watchOS only app, so you won’t find it in the normal App Store — you’ll either have to use the Watch app on your iPhone or open the App Store on your Apple Watch itself.

Once you’ve installed it on your Apple Watch, you can associate it with your Facebook account either by scanning a QR code with your camera, or going to fb.com/devices and entering an eight-digit code displayed on your watch face. Much like setting up the Facebook Watch video app on your Apple TV, this is designed to save you the trouble of having to log into Facebook Messenger with your password from the Apple Watch user interface.

Kit is clearly geared toward helping you keep in touch with your best friend or significant other, since it basically only supports messaging a single contact at a time. You’ll be prompted to pick the person you message with the most, at which point Kit will go into a single conversation mode with only that one person; although you can change to a different contact at any time, it’s not really as seamless as popping in between conversations like you would in the normal Facebook Messenger app.

Once you’ve chosen your bestie, the app will let you send a variety of quick messages with only a single tap, including voice recordings, emoji, scribbles, or even dictated speech-to-text messages. You can also choose to share your current location at any time, and scroll through the past 14 days worth of messages, although you’ll need to switch back to Messenger on your iPhone to view things like videos.

The user interface for sending messages isn’t much different from how Apple’s own Messages app works, although the main home screen provides a much quicker way to initiate a message to your favorite contact, since you don’t have to select a conversation first. You can also of course receive notifications in the app and respond to them, and have it read your contact’s messages to you.

Kit could be an especially useful app in the current climate; with many people who do have to venture out into the world wearing masks and gloves, using an iPhone to respond to messages can be much more cumbersome, so dashing off or dictating a quick message or reply on your Apple Watch is way more convenient than trying to unlock an iPhone with Face ID while wearing a mask.

The app is being released by NPE Team, which is Facebook’s research and development group (it stands for “New Product Experimentation”), rather than under the actual Facebook brand, and it’s the group’s first attempt at a native Apple Watch app. However, they’ve been responsible for some other interesting projects, such as a meme-making app called Whale, a chat service known as Bump, and the social music listening tool Aux. Most recently, they also debuted Tuned, an app designed to help couples share private moments with each other in the midst of ongoing social distancing requirements. NPE Team’s apps don’t always make it into Facebook’s mainstream, and sometimes they’re relatively short-lived — as Facebook notes, they “change very rapidly and will be shut down if we learn that they’re not useful to people.”

According to most reports, Kit is only available in Canada right now, and Facebook doesn’t typically comment on its rollout plans for NPE Team apps, but if you’re interested in checking it out, it’s worth keeping an eye on your local App Store to see if it makes an appearance there, as it seems likely to expand into other countries soon.