14 DAY TRIAL // Great news for smartphone users in India and the Philippines, as Facebook has just announced that its Lite application is now available for download to all Android fans in these countries.
While Facebook Lite has been in testing since January, it's been officially introduced earlier this month, but only in a few countries.
India and the Philippines were not among the first countries to get Facebook Lite, but beginning today, Android users in these countries can download the application which is only 430KB in size.
The full version of Facebook is about 250MB in size, so you can imagine that some of the features that require more storage space or data to be transferred have been cut out.
In fact, Facebook Lite offers four services, which are the base of the full version as well: News Feed, Push Notifications, Messages and Status Updates.
The simplified version of Facebook has been especially designed to work in areas with 2G network coverage and poor quality Internet connections.
“We will get to video soon. In India over 80% of the users are on 2G network. We have worked on improving the apps performance even on spotty connections and across devices from entry-spec devices to high-end ones,” said Vijay Shankar, product manager for Facebook Lite.
The app will be launched in Africa, Latin America and Europe soon
In case you're wondering why it took about three weeks to bring Facebook Lite to India and the Philippines, the reason might be the fact that the team behind the application has spent a lot of time testing it in these countries.
“During the development phase, the team behind the app spent a lot of time on the ground traveling across India to test and check performance of the app,” concluded Shankar.
You can now download Facebook Lite for Android for free via Google Play Store. The application should be fully compatible with all devices powered by Android 2.2 and up.
