Facebook Lite hits 100 million users in 9 months. Here’s how.

Facebook today announced that Facebook Lite, its app for the data conscious, has officially clocked 100 million monthly active users.

In India, Facebook has 142 million users, with 69 million using it every day. 133 million of these users access the app on their phone.

Facebook claims that the Lite app is the fastest growing Facebook app yet, and its goal is to provide the best user experience regardless of the type of device a person is using or their connection.

we know that cost of data and overall data usage is extremely important to people.

The announcement was coupled with details on how the social network engineered the app on its blog. “The details are meant to help others who want to create apps in emerging markets,” explains Vijay Shankar, product manager of Facebook Lite. “We’ve spent a lot of time figuring it out.”

After months of research in Indian cities, the Facebook team noticed certain trends. “Through our research in emerging markets and in seeing how people use our apps, we know that cost of data and overall data usage is extremely important to people,” it explained.

Light and frugal

The goal of the Lite app is to have the APK file (the Android application package) take up less than 1MB and use as little data as possible, all while maintaining a high quality user experience.

The average app is about 20MB in size and can take more than thirty minutes to download on a 2G network, Facebook explains.

The client – what a user sees on an Android phone – requests resources from the Facebook Lite server only when needed. The server then fetches data from Facebook’s backend services. This means more features can be added without ever increasing the size of the super light app and resources can be cached and cleared as they’re used.

The app runs a custom message protocol built on TLS (transport layer security), instead of the more commonly used HTTPS. The app also connects to a single server instead of multiple ones.

How the Facebook Lite app works.

“This design opens the door for a lot of optimizations that help with reducing data usage and performing on 2G networks,” says Facebook.

New approach