A few months ago, it appeared SMS support was being tested in the Facebook Messenger app, with some sporadically seeing SMS show up in the settings, allowing them to turn it on. It seemingly disappeared, though, with no trace left for many people. Now, however, it's back in the latest beta for Messenger.

The implementation is a little different compared to before. To enable SMS, you don't go through Messenger's settings but Android's settings (I assume the process will be different on anything less than Marshmallow, but I don't know how). Head over to Settings > Apps > Advanced (the little cog in the top right) > SMS app and enable it there.

Left: an SMS conversation. As you can see, all the normal Messenger functions still work here. Right: SMS settings.

Once enabled, go back to Messenger and you will see that your SMS messages are visible. Instead of chats having a blue app bar with purple icons, as they did last time, conversations are now fully purple, with the app bar, default profile picture, and chat bubbles branded in that color. Purple is not available to pick for the usual Facebook Messenger conversations, which will hopefully rule out any confusion that may occur. Sadly, SMS and Facebook messages are not (yet?) merged for the same user, as they are in Apple's iMessage.

If you're not in the beta testing group for Facebook Messenger, you can sign up here. The latest version is 75.0.0.11.70, which is also available on APK Mirror.