Facebook Messenger’s latest update makes it as easy to talk to friends as a single tap

The Calls tab combines your contacts and your call history

Facebook Messenger is not just built for the group chat you have with your friends. With support for video and voice calls, it is able to replace most messaging apps on your phone – as long as you keep an active Facebook profile, ie. With a new update, calls on Messenger get a greater focus on calls with a dedicated tab that feels right out of Android’s standard call feature.

The new Calls tab is rolling out to Android users from this week, making it easy to make calls and see your history in one place. It’s pretty much reminiscent of what you would see in apps like Google Duo or even in Android’s standard call feature. Your contacts – in this case your Facebook friends – are displayed as each recent call, complete with incoming or outgoing information, the type of call and the date the call took place. You can quickly call anyone by tapping the icon next to each name, or you can make a new call by tapping one of the buttons at the top of the screen.

Once rolled out to everyone, it should make it much easier to make an actual phone or video call to your friends, while also attracting more attention to voice chat. Making calls to your friends is easy in the current version of Messenger – you just select the phone or video chat icons in a conversation thread – but a dedicated tab makes this action much faster.

Facebook says audio and video calls have exploded in popularity on the platform, a 40% increase compared to early 2020. In total, 300 million calls – both audio and video only – are made on Messenger daily. With this new – and more obvious – location, you can expect the number to continue to grow.

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