Checking your own groups on Facebook, or ones you’re subscribed to, is likely one of your standard routines when you visit the social network, to the point that the company’s now decided to launch an app independent of the official client just for that purpose. Facebook Groups lets you check the feeds on all your group pages, see your messages at a glance, and view when your friends post on group pages.
You don’t need to do any sort of separate registration for the app, and when you open it, it will automatically associate with your Facebook account. It’s divided into four sections: an overview of all your groups and the number of unread messages, a section with a timeline of posts from your friends in your groups, another for searching for similar groups, and a notifications page where you can activate a ding or vibration whenever there’s new activity.
In practical terms, it might leave you wondering what value it adds given that it does the same thing as the official app, but something very similar happened recently with the Messenger app, which first split off as an independent and optional app and is now required for using Facebook chat, from your smartphone at least. The company seems to be going back to the “apps that do one thing at a time” as a basic design principle these days.
