FACEBOOK MESSENGER LITE: THE TRUE IMPLEMENTATION OF BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY

                      

Facebook has a tiny, speedy, "backward compatible" new messaging app “FACEBOOK MESSENGER LITE designed for owners of older versions of Android phones.

Facebook Messenger Lite takes up a much smaller amount of a phone's storage -- just 10 megabytes -- than the full-fat app that most users have installed on their phones, and it has been pared back so that it runs nippily over slower than average network speeds. It is the companion app to Facebook Lite, a stripped-down version of the social network, also for older versions  Android phones, launched in 2015.

The app's launch is one cog in the wheel of Facebook's strategy to make the social network and the internet as a whole more accessible to users in the developing world. One of Facebook's stated aims is to bring the next 3 billion people online and it has a number of initiatives to that end, including internet.org, FreeBasics and its Lite apps.

Unlike Free Basics and internet.org, which are wide-ranging internet accessibility projects with multiple partners, Messenger Lite is focused purely on giving Android phone owners the very basics of Facebook's popular messaging service.

The key to scaling down Messenger to run on older Android phones was to prioritise the features such as sending text, links and photos that people were using the most. "No messaging service today would be really robust if you couldn't send pictures and videos," ain’t it?

voice calls to be added in the near future.

One thing Messenger Lite won't be able to do for now is make voice calls, in this first version at least. As a huge growth area for Facebook -- 300 million people use Messenger for voice calling -- it is a feature Chudnovsky is "definitely" looking at adding to Messenger Lite in the future. "People want to use the same kind of services they use everywhere else, but it definitely requires different types of technology."

Messenger Lite has been designed to work on Android devices, from as far back as 2009, running the Gingerbread version of Google's phone software that was prevalent around that time. Chudnovsky said that he is "very optimistic" that network infrastructure in developing countries will catch up with the rest of the world quickly, but that Facebook is committed to supporting Messenger Lite far into the future to ensure it can keep running on older phones. "Even once we have connectivity we're still going to have to deal with cheap devices," he said.

Messenger Lite will be available initially to people in Kenya, Tunisia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Venezuela, and is set to come to other countries later.

source; CNET.com