Facebook Lite crosses 100 million users

Facebook Lite is a social networking app built to work on patchy mobile internet connections and outdated smartphones

Roughly two years ago, a small team of six engineers along with a product manager at Facebook's headquarters set out to figure out a way for the 'next billion people' to gain access to the social network. What they built has now become the fastest scaling product in Facebook's history.

Facebook Lite, a social networking app built to work on patchy mobile internet connections and outdated smartphones, has crossed 100 million users. Launched in June 2015, after months of testing, Lite is the fastest Facebook product to reach that milestone.

With a base of 1.35 billion users globally, Facebook Lite is one of the company's most important measures to reach out to the next billion users. With its FreeBasics and Internet.org initiatives getting the boot in India, the success of Lite becomes all the more important for Facebook.

"Emerging markets produce different sets of challenges and Facebook was initially built from the ground up not necessarily for emerging markets," said Vijay Shankar, product manager for Facebook Lite. "We discussed this internally and decided to take a two-pronged approach."

The app is available only for devices running Google's Android platform, which makes up close to 85 per cent of all phones in use today. It is built to work with slow mobile internet connections and devices with limited storage, outdated specifications and software, which are predominantly in use in emerging markets.

While the global internet user base has grown to 3.2 billion users, 1.6 billion of them still don't have access to high-speed 3G and 4G networks. This metric is further skewed towards slower connectivity in India, despite the country having about 300 million internet users, 142 million of whom are on Facebook.

For version 2.0 of the app, the company has added new features such as support for video, uploading multiple photos and emoji, which while taking it closer to the company's Big Blue app, retains its focus on saving data. For viewing videos, for example, users will be alerted of the size of the video within the user interface so they can decide whether they want to watch it or not.

Shankar says a big segment of users of Lite are first-time Facebook users. "If you think about the next billion people who are going to come online, they are going to come from emerging markets and they are going to care about the things that Lite optimises for."

Facebook is also using the platform to learn how to optimise its services for emerging markets and is actively rolling out changes across its many services. In India, it is actively sharing insights about building for slow networks with other Internet companies such as Flipkart and other small start-ups, and plans to release a technical blog on the same.

Facebook Lite supports 56 languages, with a large part of its users coming from Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the Philippines.