Facebook is bringing Instant Articles to Messenger

Facebook's Instant Articles feature launched last year, at first with select publishing partners, and then opening up to many more media outlets. This feature ensures that certain links you click in the Facebook mobile apps take you to instantly-loading content (hence the name). This content is hosted by Facebook in order to cut the loading time that you'd see if the link took you to your browser of choice which then had to open it.

Today the social network is announcing that Instant Articles is coming to its Messenger apps as well. Support for this is available on Facebook Messenger for Android first, with it scheduled to reach iOS in the next few weeks.

It works just like it does in the Facebook app. When you click a link in Messenger and the publisher of the content it's pointing to has enabled Instant Articles, then that will be presented to you. If the link doesn't point to a publisher that has enabled Instant Articles, nothing changes - you'll still view the content in your phone's browser. Like on Facebook, links that will open as Instant Articles will be marked with a lightning bolt icon.

As usual with any new feature that Facebook announces, it will take several weeks for this to roll out to all Messenger users on Android.

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