It’s easy to drop recently-taken photos and videos into your Facebook Messenger chats directly from the camera roll, but it was less easy to share Dropbox files. This previously required you to open the Dropbox app first to grab a link to share.
The latest update to the iOS Facebook Messenger app streamlines the process by allowing you to drop any file into a chat just by tapping the ‘…’ button.
The update, announced in a blog post, is one of a number of steps the company is taking to add functionality to the chat app. Facebook last year added automatic prompting to share photos of friends, along with the ability to request an Uber car from within a chat.
Videos and images—including animated GIFs—will be displayed directly in your chats. For everything else, tapping Open will bring recipients to the Dropbox mobile app, where they can preview and save files. It’s a quick, simple way to share vacation snapshots, home movies, and laugh-worthy memes with any of the 900 million people using Messenger.
Code found within the app suggests that Facebook also intends to allow person-to-person payments from within Messenger.
Facebook Messenger is a free download from iTunes. If you already have it installed, the update should roll out automatically over the next few days, but can also be manually updated from the App Store. Additionally, quitting and restarting the app often triggers an update.
