Facebook launches ‘Facebook Lite’ app for developing countries

Facebook today has launched a new lighter version of its social networking app called Facebook Lite for Android. The new Facebook Lite app is a low-cut version of the full featured Facebook app which is designed to work well on weak network connections. The app is less than 1MB in size and has plenty of other features as well like downloading low resolution photos in order to speed up the process of showing content to user as much as possible.

According to Facebook, the new Facebook Lite app is aimed towards developing countries like India, Africa and Southeast Asia where network connections are not that great to load hefty content of apps quickly. The new low-resolution version of Facebook app will work seamlessly on outdated smartphones, in bad network states and will take much less space on device’s storage than the actual app.

The launch of the new app is an effort to make Facebook available to majority parts of the world. The company is taking crucial steps into expanding its territory including the Internet.org initiative and the flying internet drones in order to provide internet access to remote areas where wired connections are not possible. According to Facebook, more than 1 billion people used Facebook on mobile for at least once a month and it plans to grow this number even more.

Currently, the new Facebook Lite app is only available to Android users. Facebook didn’t said anything about an iOS version for the app maybe because the devices that needs the downgraded Facebook app will generally be low-budget devices and iPhones does not come in that category. The app has already reached in countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, Nigeria and Nepal and will make it to other developing countries as well soon.