Facebook has rebuilt Messenger for iOS - but the Android app won't get the same treatment
Facebook has rebuilt Messenger for iOS – but the Android app won’t get the same treatment
Facebook rebuilt its Messenger app from the ground up this week, making it faster, smaller and simpler than ever – but only for iOS users.
The update – known internally as Project Lightspeed – involved a rewrite of the entire iOS app. The new Facebook Messenger is apparently able to run twice as fast at a quarter of its previous size after being pared-down from 1.7 million lines of code to just 360,000.
But, will Android users be getting the same improvements? According to Facebook, the answer to that question is no.
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Despite being the world’s most used operating system, Android’s version of Messenger will not receive the massive re-haul that the iOS app did. The news was first spotted by Android Authority.
While Android users can look forward to a few improvements to the popular messaging service, they’ll be no where near as extensive as those iOS users have received.
“Our goal is to build for the unique strengths of each platform”, a spokesperson for Facebook told Trusted Reviews. “We don’t plan to take the same exact approach as iOS, as we’ve had a Messenger Lite app on Android for years.”
Messenger Lite is a simplified version of Facebook’s messaging service that takes less than 10 MB to download. The data-efficient Messenger alternative features many of the same messaging and video call features as its big sister but is capable of loading quickly even in areas with slow and unstable internet connections.
This doesn’t mean that Android users won’t see any improvements to the main Messenger app, though.
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“We do plan to bring in key elements from Project LightSpeed (e.g., building in a reusable way, creating a new server framework) to further improve reliability and performance for our Android users,” said Facebook.
As of now, it is unclear which specific changes will be introduced to the Android app and when exactly they will arrive.
