There comes a time when you have to leave Facebook for your sanity, and you eventually deactivate Facebook in hopes that you would be away from all the inanities of social media. However, Facebook being deceptive as always, doesn’t deactivate Facebook Messenger after deleting your Facebook account. You have to go one step further and deactivate the Messenger separately. So in this article, we have compiled a simple guide to completely deactivate Facebook Messenger and help you finally attain digital nirvana.
Here, we have mentioned a straightforward guide to deactivate Facebook Messenger on iOS and Android devices. You can expand the table below and move to the relevant section as you prefer.
- Deactivate Facebook Messenger on iOS and Android
- Limit Your Facebook Messenger Usage
Deactivate Facebook Messenger on iOS and Android
Before we proceed, keep in mind that you will first have to deactivate or delete your main Facebook account before you deactivate Facebook Messenger. Unless you deactivate your main Facebook account, the option to “Deactivate” on Facebook Messenger won’t appear. Here is how to go about it.
If the reason you’re planning to deactivate Facebook Messenger is the amount of time you spend on the app daily, there are some other options you can consider as well. There’s Screen Time on iOS and Digital Wellbeing on several Android phones that you can use to limit your time on FB Messenger. So, here’s how you can use those features to control your Messenger usage.
Google released Digital Wellbeing in 2018, and it’s available on smartphones running Android 9 and above. You can use many of its features to limit your time on smartphones and set timers for individual apps. After you have used an app for a certain amount of time, it will block the app, including its notifications. This feature brings a better and healthy lifestyle to smartphone users, and in this case, allowing you to block instead of deactivating Facebook Messenger may have a positive outcome for you.
- To access Digital Wellbeing, open Settings, and scroll down to Digital Wellbeing. Open it and you will have the complete picture of your smartphone usage. Now, tap on Dashboard to get a list of apps on your smartphone.
While Digital Wellbeing is helpful, it works only on Android 9 devices and above. To get a similar feature on older versions of Android, you can use the Stay Focused app (Free, offers in-app purchases) to block and not deactivate Facebook Messenger on an Android device. This app uses accessibility permission to block selected apps, so give the accessibility permission in the beginning.
- First, open the app and search for the messenger app. Before setting the timer, the search result will show an unlocked sign on the left side. You will also see the number of times you’ve launched the app and the time spent using it.
Similar to Digital Wellbeing, Apple introduced Screen Time with iOS 12. It’s a great feature to make your life much more disciplined and productive. It enables you to limit an app’s usage, saving you the trouble to deactivate Facebook Messenger. Screen Time has a long list of features, and you can further personalize it to your liking and need. If your iPhone or iPad is running iOS 12, this is how it will work.
- Open Settings and tap on Screen Time. There, you will find a lot of options, but you need to tap on the text that says ‘Your iPhone’ and proceed further.
