This is the holy grail for Gingerbread users. Before Facebook Messenger became bloated, "Messenger Lite" ran smoothly on 2.3. You need to search for version 4.0.5 or earlier (released ~2017).
Telegram is often the most forgiving. While the official Play Store version won't work, you can often find "Telegram Lite" or older forks designed for low-resource devices. messenger for android 2.3 5 apk
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