Messenger app seems completely unusable with facebook chat. Am I doing something wrong?

Question

I got my first Windows Phone (an 8X) a few days ago. I expected to be able to use the messenger app for facebook chat, but this is my experience so far:

Conversations are not synced with facebook, so in many cases I do not receive messages:

• I do not see messages that I send from my computer, or any device other than my phone.
• I do not see messages sent while my phone was off or otherwise disconnected
• Sometimes (not all the time) I do not see messages received while I was chatting with someone from a different device
• Even when I'm chatting with someone from my phone, incoming messages are often dropped. I never know if I've missed something. This is a serious issue, as I've responded to a series of messages that was missing an important dropped message.

These apps make the messenger app completely unusable for me as a facebook chat client. I can't imagine what type of user it would be usable for. Am I missing something here? Is there a way to make the Messenger app an acceptable facebook chat client?

Answer 1

Do you have your Facebook account linked "properly" to your windows phone account? You can still chat without it, but I wasn't receiving all messages, I'd be receiving some, I'd reply, but I wouldn't receive the message in reply to mine.

Once I linked them, it was working. To check if you have linked them properly:

1. Log into outlook.com
2. Go to Account Settings
3. Go to Permissions
4. Click Manage your accounts
5. Under Facebook, click Edit
6. When I had the message drop problem, it said there was a problem with the connection and there is a button to correct this.

Every now and then my phone would also pop up a message saying "Attention required, your phone is having trouble connecting to your facebook account" - even though I thought they were already connected since my Me and People tiles were correctly linked to my Facebook account..

This fixed the dropped messages problem for me. (Lumia 800, 7.8)

Answer 2

• I do not see messages that I send from my computer, or any device other than my phone.

I have seen this exact same behavior, even from the beta device I used in mid 2010. It persists to my Lumia 920 as well. I'm not sure if this is a feature or a bug, but it has been consistently this way for me. On a side note, the Messenger chat, has for me with WP8 been better for showing messages sent from other devices, but not 100%.

• I do not see messages sent while my phone was off or otherwise disconnected

I have seen the same behavior as well. This is consistent with other chat clients I've used. My thought is that FB chat in WP is more like IM than Facebook chat, which when offline delivers "IMs" as "messages."

• Sometimes (not all the time) I do not see messages received while I was chatting with someone from a different device

I haven't seen this, but I also don't do it a lot. If I'm chatting I am usually on my phone OR on my computer, not both.

• Even when I'm chatting with someone from my phone, incoming messages are often dropped. I never know if I've missed something. This is a serious issue, as I've responded to a series of messages that was missing an important dropped message.

I have not personally experienced this issue, so I'm not sure if this is widespread or not. Have you tried soft rebooting the phone?

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I don't know if you are missing something, I doubt it. I think the first three issues you brought up are just the app working differently than you would like which is understandable. As for the dropped messages, I don't know if you are alone in that experience or not. I have personally always felt that FB chat on anything except the website was a bit wonky (it always worked oddly on Android too, never used iOS so can't say there).

While not a direct answer to your question, I hope this helps you understand that you aren't really missing anything, the app just doesn't do what you expect.