SIX MONTHS AFTER Facebook began testing Facebook Lite, a new slimmed-down version of Facebook for Android that uses less data and works well regardless of network conditions, it is officially launching the app.
Facebook has been incubating Facebook Lite for well more than a year1 under project manager Vijay Shankar. In January, his team began testing the app in Africa and Southeast Asia. Shankar says people responded to it immediately. “App reviews suggest people want it in their countries,” he says, referencing the Google Play app store, where Facebook Lite has more than four stars and 50,000 reviews.
'All the core experiences and how you come to use them in your main app will work and look and feel the same.'
VIJAY SHANKAR
The announcement comes a week after Google said it would extend its Android One program, which makes lost-cost phones with Google-designed software that can run the latest apps on slower networks. The program is so far available in six countries, including India and Indonesia. Google is also piloting several projects to make search load results faster, or evaluate network speed and serve up pages without photos on slower networks.
Both companies reference the billions of people coming online for the first time in markets that are still predominantly served by slower 2G networks. That’s billions, with a “B,” and it’s why this market is so competitive. The stakes are high: if you become the brand and service consumers adopt first, your opportunities are huge in these countries. If you lose, well, you’d best not lose.
The differences in the Facebook Lite app are, as Shankar says, “mostly under the hood.” There will be a few small design changes–for one, the official Facebook app takes up roughly 30MB of storages and requires users to message each other through a separate app, Facebook Messenger. “But all the core experiences and how you come to use them in your main app will work and look and feel the same,” Shankar says. At less than one megabyte, Facebook Lite is quick to install and to use.
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