Just yesterday (March 10th), Facebook announced that the Facebook Lite app has reached 100 million monthly active users (MAU) in just less than nine months since its release (June 4th 2015), with it claiming to be the fastest-growing version of Facebook to hit this milestone.
In less than a year, Facebook Lite is now officially available in more than 150 countries, supporting 56 languages. All that in an APK smaller than 1MB in size. The 150 countries mentioned covers Latin America, Asia, Africa, and ”parts of Europe”, plus Southeast Asian countries like Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, and Thailand. Facebook Lite is said to be popular in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Philippines, among others. Facebook Lite is only available on Android at the moment, and the company did not comment on whether or not it’ll be made available on other platforms in the future. The social network giant did mention that users of Facebook Lite will be shown some advertisements, but it did not specify which types of ads.
Facebook also timed its announcement together with the update of Facebook Lite, where new features were added, such as video support (finally), the ability to upload multiple photos, photo pinch-to-zoom (it wasn’t there before?), emojis, and more.
The dedication Facebook has to make the native Facebook experience bearable on slow networks is admirable; last year it introduced “2G Tuesdays” for its employees in the US to “dog-food” their mobile apps under slow connection scenarios. Facebook realized that there are at least 1.6 billion people still living in places without 3G, not to mention 4G, and its Facebook Lite initiative has the goal to reach these regions. While 100 million active users is still very small compared to the social network’s 1.59 billion active users number, if it continues to grow at this trajectory, Facebook Lite may be the key to reach the next billion.
Facebook also has this Free Basics service (formerly known as Internet.org) that offers a few web services for free, with the same goal to “connect the next billion”. This service is rather controversial among net neutrality advocates, because Facebook handpicks web services for Free Basics users, rather than offering a level playing field for all. It is only available in a few countries in Africa, Asia Pacific, and Latin America.
To keep serving these markets, not only must the app be “lite”, Facebook is also continuing to improve how Facebook for Android and Facebook Lite load on 2G networks. The company has written about the technical aspects on how it managed to cram Facebook into a 1MB app, which you can read more about here: https://code.facebook.com/posts/1365439333482197/how-we-built-facebook-lite-for-every-android-phone-and-network/.
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