2016-02-22

Facebook Adds Multi-Account Support for Messenger (on Android)



If you run multiple accounts on Facebook, it can feel like a herculean task to try and manage all the communications going in and out. (And, of course, it would be bad form to reply to a question to a business' page you manage from your personal account, or vice versa.) More common, though, are families that all share one device throughout the day. If everyone in the house uses a communal tablet, you'd normally have to (annoyingly) sign in and out of a bunch of Facebook accounts whenever you want to talk to your specific Facebook friends.

Facebook has been testing a multi-account feature for Messenger for a little while, and the company is now officially rolling out the feature for its mobile app—Android first, as it's not clear when (or if) iOS users might get the feature.

"All over the world, hundreds of millions of people share their phones and tablets with members of their family and friends. At Messenger, we want to make communication simpler, more seamless and secure, so we are happy that we have now launched a feature on Android that enables multiple people to log in and use Messenger from a single, shared device," Facebook's post reads.

"The beauty of this new feature is that your messages stay completely private. Anyone else who shares the device will just see the number of notifications of messages that you have, but they will never be able to see the content of your messages."

Adding multiple accounts to your Android version of Facebook Messenger is fairly easy. All you have to do is pull up the app's settings menu (from within the app itself) and look for a new option labeled "Accounts." You'll add all the various accounts you want to use in Messenger there, but you'll still have to input a password the first time you switch over to any of them. After that, you can elect to have Facebook Messenger remember the password for any account—assuming you trust your family members to not mess with your chats.

On the plus side, each account will only receive notifications for itself. So, if you're signed into your account, you won't get any kind of notice if your siblings' accounts are blowing up with messages. They'll have to pry the device out of your hands and check for themselves.

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