From 5 Countries In October, Facebook Messenger Lite Expands To 132 Countries

To ensure that smartphone users could have a great experience with Messenger service regardless of the users’ age or smartphone used, Facebook rolled out Messenger Lite to 132 more countries. Before Friday, it was available in five nations for Android users after the Messenger Lite was launched in October. The service has recently reached 200 million users.

Because Messenger Lite is only a small file, it downloads fast and takes little space on old phones which have memory issues. By minimizing data use, it saves consumers money and works on slow and unstable connections such as 2G networks. The core features of Messenger Lite are messaging, photo and link sharing, and stickers, Tech Crunch reports.

However, Messenger Lite does not have new features that are data-intensive such as camera effects, Messenger Day, and outside developer app platform. But it works offline and sends messages once the connection is regained. Messenger Lite has no compatibility issues with almost any phone running on Android OS, even Gingerbread OS.

The aggressive expansion of Messenger Lite by Facebook comes at a time when Instagram launched offline mode for Android phones and user growth of Snapchat slowed in the second half of 2016. However, Snapchat believes it does not need to cover the whole world like Facebook does, but the service could still expand in terms of users and income in popular markets like the U.S. and U.K., CIO reports.

USA Today notes that with Facebook’s almost 2 billion users, it is not clear which of the upcoming innovations are more than just gimmicks to keep members from shifting to other social media platforms that could provide more meaningful changes in their lives. The expansion of Facebook’s Messenger Lite app is one of the ways people would change the way they use Facebook. It is similar to how popular texting app could chat with bots which is an expansion of the chatbot platform.