The real story here is that now we know what Osmeta, the stealth startup Facebook acquired a few years ago, has been up to. Look inside the installation directory for the Messenger app, and you'll find that it's using an iOS compatibility layer. Unfortunately, that's bad news in terms of accessibility for blind users, at least in its current form; this thing isn't firing any focus events. But I'm sure that can be fixed.

Edit: I referred to the Messenger app, but the same applies to the Facebook app. The Messenger app was just the one I looked at first.

Remember when all the major IM platforms supported xmpp and you could just use pidgin/adium/trillian/your client of choice for everything at once?

That was a fantastic time...

This is exactly what I needed. Now I have a Telegram, HipChat, Slack, Skype, and now FB apps. I think my computer is complete.

Shame they're rolling out separate Windows 10 desktop and Windows 10 phone Facebook apps. One would think this would have been a great opportunity for a high profile example of how to do a Universal Windows Platform app.

Curious if these were built with the recently revealed React Native for UWP: https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/04/13/react-nati...

What does a Facebook app offer over just giving the website notification permissions in Chrome or Firefox?

Unfortunately they chose to make Instagram a phone-only app. I don't understand why Instagram ignores non-phone devices.

Putting my highly pessimistic privacy hat on, this gives (and has the potential to give) Facebook a lot more information than a web browser would:

* The ability to serve ads without being blocked by a browser based ad-blocker.

* The ability to use its own web view to open web pages and have more tracking of the user's activities.

* Read through all the browser histories and caches that exist on the system to get a good picture of what the user does online.

* Read email files (if not encrypted) on the system to get more information about who the user corresponds with, subjects, etc.

* Read the entire filesystem and probably upload interesting looking file metadata on to their servers for analysis.

* Read what other applications are in use, at what times, for how long they retain focus, etc., building a (somewhat) complete profile of how the user spends time while one of the FB apps is not in focus.

* Get to know all the locations the user uses the computer at and also get more information about the networks (wired or wireless) that the user uses.

* Is a key logger possible with an application on Windows 10???

* Perhaps many more things I've missed...

The above points are slightly similar to what the smartphone apps already have (although the privileges vary across smartphone OSes and versions - not everything applies to all of them).

It would seem strange for anyone who cares about privacy but needs to use Facebook (yes, that sounds like an oxymoron) to use an official app from a privacy breaking company instead of a browser with extensions to thwart tracking and to block ads.

In the interest of all of humankind, I can only hope these apps get neglected by the users, get abandoned and die a quick death!

P.S.: All the points above apply to any program you run on your computer, but these points become more disturbing when it's related to a company like Facebook.