If your slow data connection has been interrupting with your social networking experience, Facebook has come to your rescue. On Thursday, the world's largest social networking giant released Facebook Lite across Asia and parts of Latin America, Africa and Europe to overcome the problems of slow connections. The new app has been launched on Android, the largest mobile platform, and aims to use less data and run faster even in 2G data speeds.
If you have been watching Facebook's moves closely, you would understand the company's prime focus on emerging markets. For instance, people in India still use 2G connections compared to users in other developed countries who have shifted to 3G and 4G at large.
Slow internet connections have tampered users' experience on Facebook as it has been one of the high-bandwidth consuming apps. But the launch of Facebook Lite changes that as users will get full Facebook experience without actually relying on high-speed networks.
"More than a billion people around the world access Facebook from a range of mobile devices on varying networks. In many areas, networks can be slow and not able to support all the functionality found in Facebook for Android. Facebook Lite was built for these situations, giving people a reliable Facebook experience when bandwidth is at a minimum," Facebook Product Manager Vijay Shankar wrote in the company's blog post announcing Facebook Lite.
Facebook Lite, as the name suggests, weighs less than 1MB, and can be downloaded almost instantly. The app has all key features that the main Facebook app offers, including News Feed, status updates, photos, notifications, messages, group chats and also offers fast load times.
Facebook Lite is available as a free download from Google Play Store and requires Android 2.2 and up. Facebook really considered the usage of its new app on basic smartphones that run on older Android versions and are not eligible for later builds.
