After launching a lighter version of Messenger for emerging market in October last year, Facebook today has expanded Facebook Messenger Lite to 150 more countries.
The announcement came from David Marcus, self described as ‘Leading Messenger at Facebook’, who said in a Facebook post:
Making sure that everyone can have a great experience with Messenger irrespective of the age of their smartphone is very important to us. This is why today we’re making Messenger Lite available in 150 additional countries including Germany, Colombia, Italy, Vietnam, Algeria, Morocco, Nigeria, Peru, Turkey, Japan, Taiwan and the Netherlands.
So if you have an older phone that doesn’t have a lot of memory, or has limited processing power, and you want the benefit of messaging quickly with any of the 1.2+ billion people using Messenger every month, give Lite a try!
Facebook Messenger Lite is a lightweight client, weighing in at just 10MB in size. It’s designed to be faster, use less data and work in all network conditions including on 2G networks and areas with slow or unstable internet – an ideal when trying to engage emerging markets where internet connectivity is a premium service. It still includes all the Facebook Messenger features including letting you send/receive messages, as well as photos, links and of course Stickers! You can use it to interact with anyone on Facebook Messenger Lite and Facebook Messenger.
The app is now available to install from Google Play if you want to give it a shot.
I’ve been using Lite on my Huawei in Australia for a few weeks. It wasn’t just released yesterday. I used to hate how much Facebook and Messenger use up system resources on my phone, and restart themselves even when I’ve canned them. Now I use Lite for messages and Facebook webpage in Chrome. I saved the page to my home screen, so it’s like I’m using an app but it’s actually just Chrome. I don’t see any use for the Facebook app when the mobile webpage is just as good…
Even better, I log into Facebook in Opera Browser which has data compression, so I save heaps of data.
I know Chrome has a data compression feature too but Opera saves more.
I searched for Messenger and came across it yesterday.
Early impression is that its really good for quick texts… Images are appearing in low quality though.
Been using this for a while through APK installs, still needs a little work so I might wait for a few more updates.
I’m down for this, will check it out and maybe replace the main version. As long as it still has searchable GIFs ;).
Don’t think it does
you can still use gboard gifs?
No.
But it only uses 8MB of RAM instead of 80-240MB that the full version uses.
Lite is such terrible name for an App Icon
A launcher and customise the name will fix that