Today, Facebook Lite begins its official global rollout. They want it so bad that he says “some people are getting their hands on the app in other countries by getting creative on the Internet”, implying usage of VPNs to trick Google Play into letting them download. Shankar says since then it’s received almost 50,000 reviews on the Google Play store and received a 4.3 star average rating, but a lot of the reviews are just people ask when it’s coming to their country. Carriers hope a free taste of the Internet will inspire people to buy data plans, but has encountered criticism that picking and choosing what services are free goes against Net Neutrality.īut Facebook can’t get carriers to pay for everyone’s free Internet access, so it’s trying to make it as cheap as possible for users to pay for it themselves. After 6 months of work, Facebook shipped its first version of Facebook Lite in January to a few countries like Bangladesh, Nepal, and Nigeria, which TechCrunch writer Darrell Etherington spotted. It’s also launched the app, which provides carrier-subsidized free access to a limited set of “basic Internet services” including local health and civic information, news, Wikipedia, and Facebook and Messenger. The partnership with telecom companies sees Facebook building drones that rain Internet down on rural areas like Google’s Project Loon Balloons, and building data compression technologies. More recently, Facebook launched its big initiative to bring access to the 5 billion people without the web. Facebook acquired Snaptu, which had helped it build a feature phone app for the developing world, which it then renamed Facebook For Everyphone. A half decade back it launched Facebook Zero, a text-only version of Facebook subsidized by carriers as a way to convince people they wanted the Internet. To use as little data as possible, as the prohibitive cost of data plans is actually the largest barrier to Internet usage, not network accessįacebook’s been chasing the developing world for years.To load fast even on 2G mobile connections, which is what 4 billion people on earth are stuck with.To work on any Android phone, regardless of storage space, RAM, and CPU. Rather than imagine what the problems in these areas were, Shankar says “we did a lot of research on the ground and spent a lot of time in Africa, and India and Indonesia.” The team discovered the solution would need three things: What if we were building this from scratch for emerging markets? How do we completely re-architect this?” Second, Shankar tells me “We floated another idea. It’s already shrunk down its main Android app. First, it would try optimize its flagship apps to load faster with less data. So Facebook set out on two parallel paths. “Roughly a year back, that’s when we realized that our current Facebook experiences needed a lot more work, specifically in emerging markets and more specifically where networks are bad” Facebook Lite’s product manager Vijay Shankar tells me. But it’s nothing like where most of Facebook’s users live, and certainly not where its will need to look to reach the 2 billion user milestone. From the top-of-the-line smartphones, LTE networks, and unlimited data plans of Menlo Park, California, you might not think anything was wrong with Facebook.
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