Extremely flaky behavior with Facebook messenger app

By Luke, 5 June, 2023

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

As of the past couple weeks, I’ve been experiencing really strange behavior while trying to use the Messenger app on my iPhone SE 2022. It’s hard to explain, but say you’ve got a chat pulled up and you are touching the Messages list to try to read Through the conversation. It’s like it will start reading from an earlier point in the conversation and then just continue reading each successive message after that, and it will not stop. If you touch elsewhere on the screen it will just read whatever the next message was going to be. The only way to make it stop is to navigate away from the app and come back to it again. Even the onscreen keyboard is not functional when it starts doing this. I hope this made sense. Is anyone else experiencing this?

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Comments

By Steve Mann on Friday, June 23, 2023 - 20:19

That's a bug in the Messenger app that's existed since at least April, and it's likely going to be another one of those long standing bugs the developers will consistently claim they don't know the cause of, kind of like the one in 2016 that hid all the functions in chat windows, and that one didn't get fixed until a bunch of people organized and threatened to sue them if they didn't fix it.

By Luke on Friday, June 23, 2023 - 20:19

I can’t actually think of a time where the FB messenger app has worked reliably with voiceover, though I personally haven’t experienced this particular bug before, since it first popped up for me a couple weeks ago. It’s crazy! It basically hijacks voiceover completely until you navigate away from the app. Meta accessibility is always talking about their commitment to improving, blah blah blah… Well, they need to put their money where their mouths are. This is an egregious and unacceptable user experience problem.