The recent versions of Facebook app for Android and iOS platform do not allow us to download the videos and save them on the phone or tablet. There might be many reasons behind removing this features. But fortunately we have found a working solution to download the videos using the method mentioned after the break.
Why Facebook Doesn’t Allow Downloading of Facebook Videos?
There might be many reasons. It may be they want to encourage the users to share the already uploaded video instead of first downloading them on the phone storage and then re-upload it.
Another possibility, which I think is near to actual reason, is that they want to introduce video ads in future. Due to this reason they have also included the built-in video player which automatically starts the video while browsing the timeline, though this feature can be turned off from the settings or set it to ON only on WiFi network but this feature has also killed the option to open the video in another app.
Whatever the reason it is many users still want to get the old feature where they get a pop up containing the icons of all the supported apps to open the video. Few months back we posted a simple trick which allowed us to bring back that feature in the native Facebook software but that trick works only for few minutes and after that the change is reverted.
On that post one of our readers left a comment which led us to write this new “how to guide”. This new method doesn’t involve any special trick or hack to download Facebook videos on your android phone or tablet. All you have to do is to install few softwares from the PlayStore to get the feature working.
Method to Download Facebook Videos:
First of all install Firefox browser and any simple download manager from PlayStore. I tried ES File Explorer which also contains a download manager in it but it didn’t work as expected. In fact it stops downloading the video when it is sent into background. The other app I tried is Advanced Download Manager. It is really good software to download any type of file from internet on android device.
- Launch Firefox and login to Facebook mobile site.
- Browse to the video you want to download. Tap on it.
- The video will start playing in new window. Once it has started playing, you’ll see a small “android icon” in the address bar of Firefox.
- Click this icon and you’ll get a pop listing all the supported applications. Choose ADM Editor (Advanced Download Manager Editor) from the list.
- The video will be added in the queue to be downloaded.
- In case the video doesn’t start downloading after a while, open ADM and click on stop and re-start button to resume download.
This method is the best I found to download Facebook videos. I tried many different tricks and applications but none of them worked for me. However, there is one drawback of this method and that is you have to use Facebook on Firefox.
There is also a workaround if you don’t want to ditch the official Facebook app. You can keep using the official app but to download the video you can switch to Firefox. Now the question is how to find the exact video on Firefox you saw in the Facebook app without going all searching and browsing steps. Here is the workaround.
- In the native app, like the video, share it or comment on it which you want to download.
- Now open Firefox and go to your “Activity Log” in the Facebook mobile site.
- You’ll see the recent likes, comments and shares on the top. Click on the desired link and download video as mentioned in the steps above.
That’s all. If you are using any other method for this purpose, please share with us.
Very informative! Thanks for showing clearly how to download Facebook videos. I’d also recommend Acethinker Video Downloader which I have used for many years. It is a free cloud based software to download videos without install any software in your device. Share it here as an alternative method.
Thanks for leaving the valuable comment.
Thank you very much. So helpful!
Thank You So Much.