Facebook recently let the media know that Facebook Lite, its Android app for developing countries, reached 100 million monthly active users.
The figure comes almost nine months after the app rolled out, making it the fastest-growing version of Facebook.
The company released Facebook Lite back in June 2015 and it's come a long way since then. To adapt it to the conditions in developing countries, Facebook packed the software at under 1 MB in size and designed it to work well with slow Internet speeds. You can use it in over 50 languages, with the app reaching more than 150 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and some European areas.
According to Facebook, India leads the pack of emerging countries: the country has 142 million monthly active users, 69 million of which log in daily to their Facebook accounts. A whopping 94 percent of the daily logins take place via mobile devices.
Vijay Shankar, Facebook's Leader of Product for Emerging Markets, tells Gadgets 360 that Facebook Lite comes to meet the needs of about 1.6 billion people who do not have the luxury of connecting to 3G or 4G networks.
He exemplifies by saying that Indonesia, Philippines, Brazil, India and Mexico are the places where the app sees unrivaled popularity. Shankar notes that even those users who do have access to 3G networks face problems due to unstable connections and on-and-off signal.
He reminisces about the starting point in 2015 when his company realized how popular the minimalistic variant of the app was becoming.
"We wanted to stay true to the core values of the app, which is working on any phone or connection, and having good data usage," Shankar says.
He goes on to say that each feature of the mini FB was carefully pondered upon, so that the re-engineering would be reduced to a minimum.
Since its launch in June 2015, FB Lite saw increased features and support. The company added video-support and the possibility for users to upload multiple photos. Also, performance was in developers' focus all along, and they managed to cut down app loading time by as much as 25 percent.
In its announcement, Facebook notes that it checked three important criteria when creating Facebook Lite: keep the app under 1 MB; craft the app so it plays nicely with Gingerbread and works fine on devices from 2009; and design client-server interaction that utilizes minimal data, thus delivering optimal experience on slower 2G networks.
Shankar explains how his company managed to bundle all these demanding requests into such a tiny app.
"We call out the file size of the video. It sounds like a small thing, but this has really helped. We also make the resolution slightly lower, so it loads faster," he says.
Gautam Roy, Technical Lead on Facebook Lite at Facebook, also details other means that helped lighten the app.
"Instead of using HTTPS, Lite uses a custom message protocol over TLS (directly over TCP)," Roy says.
By using compressed message exchange and the TLS connection, the client uses the data in a more economical way. Using this particular design gives way to optimization that trims data usage and increases performance on 2G networks.
How is your experience with Facebook Lite? Let us know in the comment section below.
