Facebook has finally launched its Facebook Lite app for Android devices in India, a move aimed at improving its product penetration in emerging markets.
Starting with India and the Philippines, users will now be able to download and use the new app directly from the Play Store.
The app has been on the Google Play store since January but is now usable in India, said Vijay Shankar, product manager for Facebook Lite. Facebook Lite, which is in version 1, will feature all core functions of the standard app like news feed, messaging, photos, links, notifications etc. Currently, the app does not support video. "We will get to video soon," said Shankar.
The social media giant has taken care of most problems faced by smartphone users in emerging markets like app size, data usage and application performance across devices.The company claims that the new app, which is less than 1MB in size, has a much lower data usage and performs better across devices and networks. "In India, over 80% of the users are on 2G networks. We have worked on improv ing the apps performance on spotty connections and across smartphones from entry-spec devices to high-end ones," said Shankar.
The app has been in develop ment for over a year and the team has been testing it across markets across Africa and Asia for the past six months before taking it public. "During the de velopment phase, the team be hind the app spent a lot of time on the ground travelling across and check performance of the The app will be rolled out in oth India to test and check performance of the app," he said. The app will be rolled out in other markets across Asia, Europe and Latin America in the coming weeks. Both Facebook Lite and the standard Facebook app will work on a single device at the same time.
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