During the F8 developer conference last year, Facebook promised to bring a new Messenger app to desktop devices, both on macOS and Windows 10. The Windows 10 version of the app has been in public beta testing for some time, and the macOS variant was spotted in some regions last month, but today, the new Messenger is officially available on both platforms.
The goal of the new app is to bring over most of the features of the mobile Messenger apps, and wrap them in a package that looks and feels more native to each platform. The previous Windows 10 app was based on an old version of the iOS app, and the design was somewhat out of place on Windows.
The new app does pretty much what you"d expect it to do, including group video calls and, of course, message syncing across devices. It also supports dark mode, which only made its way to the mobile apps somewhat recently.
If you"re interested, you can download the new Messenger app from the Microsoft Store or the Mac App Store, depending on your platform of choice.