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.
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.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg aspires to expand access to the internet to every corner of the globe, an initiative he calls Internet.org. (Facebook Lite was developed separately.) One aspect of this work, Facebook’s push to make free basic services available in countries where data is prohibitively expensive for many, inspired a backlash this spring involving activists who claim it does not respect net neutrality. (In an April 16 blog post, Mark Zuckerberg defended the project, saying it can “coexist” with net neutrality.) But Internet.org has many other projects in the works, including developing drone and satellite technology that may eventually bring the internet to places that don’t have it at all.
A large part of the work on Facebook Lite happened at Facebook’s Innovation Lab, which it built last year in collaboration with Ericsson, at the social network’s Menlo Park headquarters. The lab offers Facebook engineers and outside developers the chance to test how apps perform in developing world environments.
Facebook Lite will begin its roll-out with a few countries in Asia, aiming to expand to Latin America, Africa and Europe in the coming weeks.
1UPDATE 2:45 PM ET 05/22/14: This story has been updated to correct that Facebook Lite is not a part of Internet.org.
