Meta released Forum, a new iPhone-only Facebook app called Forum that creates a dedicated space for Facebook Groups on iPhone, and the company says it is testing the product publicly. Feryal Hemamda, a Meta spokesperson, said, “We test lots of new products publicly to see what people find interesting and useful to their experiences across our apps.”
Forum automatically pulls in the groups a user is part of on Facebook after the user logs in with a Facebook account, and it adds a built-in AI chatbot under an Ask tab that can generate responses by drawing on posts from various Facebook groups. Users can post with a nickname inside the app, and anything shared on Forum will be visible in the user’s groups on Facebook. Admins keep access to their existing tools on Facebook, and Forum adds an admin AI assistant to help manage groups, moderate content and keep communities healthy.
The new iphone app is the third Facebook-family offering specifically on iOS this month. Meta introduced two new iPhone apps in May: Forum joins the standalone Facebook app and Messenger on iOS, and it follows Instants, the new iPhone app Instagram launched earlier in the month. Meta positions Forum as a place focused on group discussion, advice and recommendations, and in the reporter’s test the chatbot referenced posts from a couple of Magic groups and even suggested groups in New Jersey.
The facts give scale to what feels like a deliberate pivot: Forum revives a concept Meta once abandoned. Facebook shut down its standalone Groups app in 2017 after a short run, and Forum is being described inside the company and by observers as a revival of that effort, but this time with an AI layer built into the experience. That AI — surfaced in the Ask tab — is explicitly allowed to search and synthesize content from group posts to answer questions or suggest groups, rather than limiting users to manual searches and forum threads.
The context is straightforward. Forum is designed around the social convenience of groups: it automatically imports the communities users already belong to, it lets them post under nicknames, and it connects those posts back to Facebook so nothing lives only on the new app. Admins retain their Facebook tools while gaining an AI assistant on Forum for moderation and community upkeep. Meta has framed the launch as part of public testing — a pattern Hemamda emphasized in her statement about trying new products publicly to learn what users find useful.
The clean narrative contains a tension. Forum is iPhone-only but tightly integrated with Facebook; it imports groups automatically yet posts made with a nickname remain visible in the original Facebook groups. That mix of friction and connection will drive how communities and moderators respond. Admins now have an admin AI assistant on Forum to help with moderation, but they still manage core tools on Facebook. The two-platform split — an iPhone-native app layered on top of a long-standing web and app infrastructure — raises practical questions about where moderation decisions are recorded, how the AI’s summaries and suggestions are traced back to source posts, and how communities will treat answers produced by a bot that pulls from multiple groups.
Another point of strain: Meta is relaunching a groups-focused product after a failed experiment in 2017, but this version hinges on generative tools that can repurpose posts across communities. In the reporter’s test, the chatbot cited posts from Magic groups and suggested local groups in New Jersey, showing both how the tool can surface relevant community knowledge and how it aggregates across spaces users may consider distinct. Meta’s explicit choice to make Forum iPhone-only for now leaves open questions about whether the app’s features will spread to Android or the web, and whether the company will keep the same automated group-import behavior as it scales.
The next phase is simple and consequential: adoption and control. Meta is testing Forum publicly to see whether people adopt an iPhone-first, AI-assisted way to find and manage group conversations, and whether admins accept an AI assistant that intervenes in moderation. The single question worth watching is whether Forum’s blend — automatic group imports, nicknamed posting, visible cross-posting to Facebook and an AI that pulls from multiple groups — strengthens communities or simply relocates the old friction into a new app. How users and admins answer that will determine whether Forum becomes a product people use every day or another experiment Meta folds back into Facebook’s core apps.
