In a country like India that has smartphone users who are yet to taste the speed of 3G, Facebook Lite app will help in further improving Facebook userbase. According to Facebook, the Lite App will be unveiled soon in Europe, Africa, and Latin America.
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Social giant Facebook has finally launched a lighter versi0n of the Facebook called as Facebook lite for all the Android devices in India, in a process to enhance its product penetration in emerging markets. The app supports nearly all the basic features of the social networking site. This application will cater initially to Android users in India and Philippines, although it is only a matter of time before it will also be available on Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iOS and Microsoft Corp.’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows mobile operating system.
Amidst all the excitement about the advent of 4G in India is the stark fact that nearly 80 per cent of the country is still on 2G.
Facebook now has over 125 million users in India, said Vijay Shankar, product manager at Facebook.
The user interface the application offers is similar to the bigger application. The app uses a compression technology wherein most of the heavy lifting is done on Facebook’s servers.
Facebook Lite is trying to win over India and the Philippines. Usually, when we’re on the road in remote areas, we give up on Facebook because it’s nearly certainly not going to load more posts. However, it has no support for videos as of now. He says the original Facebook is a complex “beast of an app” that cannot really perform well on devices that have low processing power, RAM and storage. You won’t find Facebook videos on the Lite version since they can hog bandwidth. “Also, this is quick to install and load”, he said.
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“Over 875 million people in the world access the Internet through 2G and we wanted to create a good user experience for these users to enable better access in emerging markets”, Shankar told TechinAsia.
