The social media giant Facebook has enabled its screen-sharing feature for Messenger on mobile devices, allowing you to share your phone or tablet screen when calling a friend one on one, in a group chat, or while taking part in even larger conversations via Messenger Rooms.
“Screen sharing lets you share a live view of your screen so you can share virtually anything together. Whether you want to share memories from your camera roll, shop together online, co-browse social media, and more — screen sharing makes it easy to stay connected and close with your loved ones, even when you’re physically apart.” Nora Micheva, Product Manager of Messenger said in a blog post.
In addition to screen sharing on mobile and web, screen sharing is also available in Messenger Rooms with up to 16 people on web and desktop. Facebook will soon add the ability to control who can share their screen in Rooms and expand the number of people you can share your screen with up to 50 within Messenger Rooms.
With these new controls, Room creators will be able to determine whether to limit the ability to screen share to just themselves or make the feature available to all participants when creating a room and during the call.
To share your screen, first make sure you have the latest version of Messenger installed. Then, during a call, swipe up from the bottom of your screen to reveal the call options. Then just click “share your screen,” “start sharing,” and then “start broadcast” (presumably Facebook is giving you that many warnings so you don’t start sharing anything by mistake). After that you can navigate as you like on your phone, or return to the call to stop the broadcast.
While screen sharing is already available on a number of video chat services, including Skype and Zoom, Messenger works particularly well on mobile devices, so having the option on iOS and Android is definitely a big improvement.
