Facebook has hit saturation in its home market, growth has slowed down considerably, so the best way for the social network to keep growing is to make it easier for folks in emerging markets to sign-up and use the service on a regular basis.
One of the biggest problems with emerging markets is that they tend to lack solid Internet infrastructure. To combat this issue and to make it easier for emerging markets such as Africa to better use Facebook, the company has updated its Android app to be 50 percent faster, and 50 percent more data efficient compared to a year ago.
In addition, the download size is 65 percent smaller, which should make it a lot easier for folks in Africa to download the Facebook app on a slower network.
We have to say, it is pretty impressive to see this happening, though some might wonder why this efficient update is only for Android devices. Well, low cost and low spec'd Android devices are popular in emerging markets, so those who are hoping for the Facebook app on iOS and Windows Phone to get the same treatment might have to wait a while.
"In terms of performance, we wanted to improve slow start times on old devices. In the beginning, we focused on instrumenting the startup path and understanding the bottlenecks. There was no silver bullet in this process - we needed to carefully identify and remove each potential bottleneck," says Facebook in a blog post.
Apparently, the team who worked on the Android app took a trip to Africa to gather information. The team purchased several low-end Android smartphones to test the Facebook app, which made them realize how rubbish the Facebook app performed on these devices.
Performance was slow due to the devices having low memory, and load times were also slow, which has a lot to do with slow network connection. The team even burned out a full month data package in 40 minutes. Madness? Certainly!
These issues are the things that forced the team to make the Android app better in performance and efficient on a low bandwidth network. If this plan works, then Facebook would have paved the way for hundreds of millions of new subscribers in the coming years.
