Facebook is now focusing to deliver better network to emerging markets by reducing the Android app's size and data consumption while its boosting performance.
Facebook, the largest social networking company, is improving its Android application on the Google Play Store to offer the best experience on mobile with consuming less data. Android smartphones are known to cover both ends of the price range, but data plan to use the app in some countries is a pricey deal. Hence, users limit their usage to less data consuming apps and basic mobile functions. That is no longer the case for Facebook for Android, as the social networking giant engineers and product managers visited Africa and discovered four key areas to work on so they can make Facebook affordable on mobiles.
With more than one billion users worldwide, Facebook is aiming to connect the remaining five billion people who are not connected to the network. Most of these people live in emerging markets where smartphones are not a popular choice and data plans do not come cheap. By updating its Android app, the company is pushing to reach new markets with few tweaks. The modifications to the Facebook app follow a series of tests by the Facebook team in Africa, using different Android handsets - Facebook engineer Alex Sourov wrote in a blog post last Thursday. Due to the intermittent, low-bandwidth network connection and lack of memory on mobile phones, the app crashed several times or took longer than usual to load data. In the process, the monthly data plan was exhausted in just 40 minutes. After working on re-engineering the Android app, the new Facebook app now offers better performance, data efficiency, improved networking and reduced size of the app - four key areas discovered by the engineers during their trip to Africa. Facebook wanted to make sure the app works at a good speed, regardless of the device. On single-core devices, the app took longer to start as several features automatically started themselves on the launch of the app. The engineering team delayed the initializations until after startup, which resulted in 50 percent reduced start time in the six months after the Africa trip. The social network also tweaked the News Feeds to load more quickly by accessing cached content for those on slower networks. To improve data efficiency, Facebook tweaked image compression and loading process for basic Android phones. The company achieved 50 percent less data consumption on app usage, which definitely helps users in emerging markets. The modification on data efficiency did not come at the cost of slow or failed image loading, which was reduced by 90 percent as compared with previous year. Facebook also reduced the size of its Android app by 65 percent. This is helpful to those on capped downloads and those with mobile phones with less space on disk. "The lessons learned have already impacted the development of new features. We test all major features and changes in poor networking scenarios," Sourov added. "We have automated verification for various performance and efficiency characteristics, which allows the features team to receive immediate feedback on the impact of their code. We also expanded our playbook to other apps, such as Messenger and Instagram." The updated Facebook app for Android is available for download on Google Play Store or users can update the app from their mobile devices.
