Facebook has announced it has completely rewritten the Messenger chat app for iOS making it twice as fast and just a quarter of the size.

The social network is commencing a rollout of the ‘faster, smaller and simpler’ app, which now has 360,000 lines of code compared to the 1.7 million lines featured in the current version.

That makes the app more responsive, Facebook says in a blog post, but it will also enable the company to move closer to its goal of enabling cross-platform messaging between WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.

The new version of Messenger “lays the foundation to fulfill our vision for private messaging and interoperability across apps, allowing us to scale our messaging experience in the future,” Facebook writes.

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That’s unlikely to please those users and privacy advocates dead set against the company merging all of its properties into one bit data pot – especially those who’ve chosen to use Instagram or WhatsApp, but have resolutely stayed away from the main Facebook services.

However, if your primary concern is a faster, simpler and smaller app, here’s what Facebook has to say about that:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself took to his personal page to comment on the relaunch: “We’ve completely rewritten Messenger to get a lot faster. Starting today, we’ll be rolling out the new Messenger app for iOS. Once the rollout is complete, Messenger will be one quarter the size and load twice as fast. When you open Messenger throughout the day, it will feel much faster and more responsive compared to other apps you use. Enjoy!”

The company does say that some features will be unavailable, temporarily, after the relaunch, but doesn’t go into detail on which will be missing.

Would you like to see all of the Facebook messaging apps go under one roof? Let us know @trustedreviews on Twitter.

Chris Smith

Chris Smith is a freelance technology journalist for a host of UK tech publications, including Trusted Reviews. He's based in South Florida, USA. …