Facebook Messenger VOIP calling expands outside of Canada

Unlike when it enabled the new Chat Heads feature with an update via the Play Store, Facebook has silently pushed out a feature to its Messenger app today to enable free VOIP calling. If you'll recall back to the beginning of March, the same happened to iOS users and Android users in Canada, but now we're looking at expanded availability in the U.S. and several more countries as well. The calls are of course completely free, and work between two Facebook users over data rather than the carrier's voice networks.

To check and see if you have the option available, tap into an ongoing chat and hit the "i" button in the top right corner. You should then see a simple "Free Call" button. It isn't the most elegant solution, but as a first release we're not going to complain much. Are you seeing the feature enabled in your own Messenger app? Let us know in the comments below.

"Forever tinkering with gadgets."

Facebook updating their Android app outside of Google Play for some users

For the past couple of days users have been seeing a download notification for a new Facebook build (140579 or 141046). The notification would get stuck for many folks, and reboots or battery pulls just caused another notification and stuck download. The whole thing pretty much acted like a clunky, amateurish malware attack.

It's not. The update is legit, and from Facebook. They are pushing out an update outside of the Play Store (which is a direct violation of the developer agreement, by the way) to some users to test new features. If you have the setting checked to allow installations from unknown sources (sideloading) you might have seen this. You also might still be stuck fiddling with the notification that won't go away. To fix that, hook up with some Wifi -- Facebook won't download the update while you're using your data connection.

Let's ignore that Facebook may be breaching their developer agreement. Lets also ignore that they are silently pushing software to a users phone, when that user is unaware and didn't ask for it. We'll also overlook the way Facebook thinks all Wifi is free and unlimited. But we can't overlook the fact that they let this go on for three days and still haven't posted a little something to their blog or dropped a little blurb in the Google Play app description to let the users -- you know, the ones who are worried what the hell this fake Facebook download is doing -- know what was going on.

Anyhoo, if you see the notification about it, just turn on your Wifi and it will overwrite your current Facebook app with something -- nobody knows exactly what, because Facebook hates change logs, too -- newer, and hopefully better.

Via: The Verge