Facebook Messenger Account

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Adds Facebook Messenger support to SailfishOS accounts, using the purple-facebook libpurple plugin and the telepathy-haze library. The advantage over the XMPP approach is that messages can be sent and received even if one party is/was offline.

Known issues:

  • group messages do not work (at least from what I've tried)
  • messages are marked read as soon as they arrive (not when you read them)
  • an old version of purple-facebook (3d30d24fdbef from 12. August 2015) is used, until the mark-read behavior is changed upstream or patched in the current version
  • if this application refuses to upgrade, please reinstall it (together with purple-facebook)

 

After the installation, go to Settings/Accounts/New Account and add the Facebook Messenger account. As the username, use your Facebook username. As for the password, I have tested it only with an app specific password (can be generated in your Security settings on the Facebook web), so that is the recommended approach. After adding the account, restart your phone and now you can go online with the account.

 

Heavily inspired by Thaodan's Skype Account plugin.

 

If you have any other issues, please let me know - I have not tested this much, so install/use only at your own risk. On the other hand, issues will most likely come from the purple-facebook plugin, so it is up to its developers to fix them.

 

I'm not the author of the purple-facebook library, just a packager, so donations for the plugin should go to those developers. Nevertheless, the packaging also took me quite a lot of time (still being quite an inexperienced packager), so if you like it, then please consider a small donation:

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Application versions: 
Changelog: 

0.4 - Minor change - fixed account icon path to accomodate to jolla-ambient -> sailfish-default theme changes in Sailfish 2.0.1.7.

0.3 - Downgraded purple-facebook to version 3d30d24fdbef from 12. August 2015 as a workaround for never-ending notifications. If you cannot upgrade, then please refresh my repo and reinstall both this package and purple-facebook.

0.2 - Replaced custom account icon with the default from Jolla

0.1 - Initial release

Comments

nodevel's picture

Hi, I am sorry if it does not work well. The version of the supporting library we have to use is almost 1 year old and the development is moving forward quite fast, so one day it may stop working altogether.

The reason we use such an old library is that it's the last one that works with SailfishOS. There is an effort to bring back the support, but it is moving quite slowly (if at all).

I could use the newer version without the needed fix, but messages would arrive every few seconds, as the phone would not mark them as read.

codeandcreate's picture

it works nicely for me, but i got on every connect a security warning on facebook... and i can't save the application on known applications in fb...

explit's picture

Hello NoDevel! Thank you very much for your great work! The FB Messenger 0.4.1 worked without problems for about 2 Month on my Jolla 2.0.1.7 but now i have connection issues. It doesn't connect at all. Sometimes, after i try to make all my IM accounts on Avaiable, it connects for 5sec., i see, who of my contacts is online and it disconencts after 5-6 sec.

Did FB changed something again?

 

Thanks

Schturman's picture

for me it still working ok... I want version for tablet....

 

explit's picture

Any news on tablet version?

Need to compile libpurple-facebook i486?

 

Schturman's picture

Please, create version for tablet. Thanks.

elastic's picture

 

Stopped working today (or maybe yesterday) it won't connect anymore - tried to login again - says wrong login/pwd got a new one from Facebook but still not working - messenger service works on iPad and blackberry though ...

Edit: After reinstall and reboot it's  working again ... 

nodevel's picture

Same here, thanks for the report. I was afraid something changed and it is gone for good, but removing account + reboot + readding the account helped.

It looks like the upstream purple-facebook is on a good way to implement changes that would allow us to use the current version, so once that happens many problems should be fixed.

neofuzon's picture

Excellent !! Thanks.

Would it be possible to have icon file in the next release RPM please?

 

Thanks.

AnttiT's picture

I'm getting tons of notifications about logins from unknown browser/device into my Facebook notifications view. Even after disabling the messenger account, Facebook seems to get logins couple of times every hour.

Piece_Maker's picture

Getting an error when I try and install this (As well as the Skype account plugin) -

Status: dep-resolution-failed

Extra details:

nothing provides telepathy-haze needed by haze-accounts-extensions-facebookmessenger-0.4-1.noarch

I've not had SailfishOS for very long so appreciate this is probably a dumb one, but where do I get telepathy-haze from? Cheers!

nodevel's picture

Thanks for the feedback.

What phone do you run Sailfish on?

telepathy-haze is available from the official jolla repository. Try running

pkcon repo-list

in the terminal to see if the repository is present.

Piece_Maker's picture

Thanks for the help! :) 

 

I'm running on a ZTE Open C, I know it's about as far from an 'official' device as it gets though. The Jolla repo seems to be there - says:

Enabled         Jolla          Jolla 

 

There is also apps, common, hotfixes and store, as well as the openrepos ones I've added on my roaming round this site :D

nodevel's picture

I see. Let's try to figure out where's the problem then! :)

Could you try running

pkcon refresh

and then posting the output of

pkcon search name telepathy-haze

?

 

Thanks!

Piece_Maker's picture

Hi, I appreciate the help! However in the meantime I've tracked my issue down. Apparently Jolla don't allow unofficial phones access to their store (That explains why the official Jolla store was completely empty for me...) - I actually got around this by adding the mer-tools repo (pkcon ar mer-tools) then installing telepathy-haze from there. Installed the Facebook Messenger Account program and all is well! :D 

Thanks again for helping :D

nodevel's picture

No problem, I'm glad you solved it. And thanks again for the info - it might help to solve this issue for others. As I only have a Jolla, I couldn't reproduce this issue (with missing telepathy-haze) before.

247's picture

still not working for me...was working flawlessy in saimaa but not in taalojarvi...any help?

nodevel's picture

Thanks for feedback.

May I ask what is not working? Does it log in? It works fine here, but I'll try to test it further.

247's picture

i can log in and my account is listed as active but no contact is shown in people app...other than that the status manager in settings app tell me i have no app that make us of status...plugin was working fine in saimaa but i had to do a factory reset and updated finally to taalojärvi where the plugin is not working... :)

nodevel's picture

That's weird... May I ask what password are you using? I don't mean the exact password, just whether you use the main password from your account, or a generated app password :)

I am using the generated app password as I recommend in the description (it's the safest option anyways), I have Taalojärvi installed and I see Facebook contacts in Contacts, see their status, messages arrive only once... Pretty much everything works as before.

247's picture

i'm using my username and my fb password since it always worked before upgrading to taalojarvi :)

nodevel's picture

Yeah, well... It works absolutely fine here. And using the specific app password has been recommended since the beginning, and for a reason - maybe it won't solve your problem, but it is way safer and worth a shot.

Just an advice for the future - you should not put your main password into any random application you find on the internet - especially not on Warehouse/OpenRepos, where is no QA control present. Using an app specific password at least minimizes the risk.

247's picture

well i should try with a new pass :)
edit : now it's working...thanks :)

itdoesntmatt's picture

the problem is that, as the old old versions, messages still continue to arrive again and again unless you open it . Can you fix it? thanks

 

nodevel's picture

Thanks for the feedback.

I haven't experienced such behavior, but I don't use Facebook chat that often, so it may take some time to reproduce it. However, even if I find that problem, I don't think I'll be able to fix it - at least not until some type of configuration is possible in the Pidgin plugin - we are stuck with an old version that is compliant with the Sailfish architecture and there is not much to do.

carepack's picture

still no i486 version of libpurble for the tablet?

nodevel's picture

Without the tablet, I don't really have anywhere to test it. I might look into cross-compilation later, but I unfortunately lack the time now.

247's picture

not working anymore in taalojärvi...think it need and update...

nodevel's picture

It works fine here (2.0.1.7, Taalojärvi). As I mentioned in another comment, this is very independent on any SailfishOS release, so it is very improbable that this will be broken with a system update.

 

What is more likely is that it will be broken by some Facebook changes. But it works for now.

Schturman's picture

Hi, can you update your package please? After last system update (2.0.1.7) it now show icon.
Thanks

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