Facebook Lite goes past 100 million monthly active users, emerges fastest growing Facebook app

Facebook Lite goes past 100 million monthly active users, emerges fastest growing Facebook app

Facebook last year launched a stripped down version of its social networking application, Facebook Lite, optimized for slower network connectivity in countries such as India. In less than a year of its launch, the application has gone past 100 million monthly active users and 69 million daily active users. In fact, it has achieved the milestone in about nine months, which is the fastest for any Facebook app thus far. Facebook has also announced new features for the Facebook Lite including support for video, multiple photo uploads, pinch-to-zoom for photos, emojis, and more. India is among the top five markets for Facebook Lite. 

Facebook Lite is essentially a Lite version of the main Facebook application and is just 1MB in size. The app is optimized for slower Internet speeds such as 2G with greater emphasis on basic features such as sharing status and messaging. It works with older Android versions like Gingerbread and above, and works with 2009 year class devices like the Samsung Galaxy Y.

Facebook reveals the Lite was driven by Facebook For Every phone service for smart feature phones and improved and rolled it out to Android.

“Instead of using HTTPS, Lite uses a custom message protocol over TLS (directly over TCP). Compressed message exchange takes place over the persistent TLS connection the client establishes to the server for the duration of the session. This design opens the door for a lot of optimizations that help with reducing data usage and performing on 2G networks. Lite has a set of image servers that talk to the CDN and other image stores to enable the Lite server to serve exact-size images to the client,” Facebook explains mechanism behind the Lite application.

Facebook says the app is now available in 56 languages and is most popular in emerging markets like Brazil, India, Indonesia, Philippines and Mexico.

Internet companies such as Facebook and Google have been making attempts to tap emerging markets like India. Despite a massive number of mobile Internet users, slow Internet speeds have been a major challenge for these companies. While 3G and 4G are expanding in the country slowly, a lot of users are still on older 2G network. Two prime reasons for the slow adoption of the faster network are relatively expensive 3G and 4G data packs and inconsistency of these networks.

In case of Facebook, the Lite version allows it to retain users on slower and lower end smartphones by giving basic features, though experience is certainly not as smooth as the main version of the application. Of late Google and even e-commerce sites Flipkart and Snapdeal have launched Lite versions of their applications in India to resolve this problem.