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Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, recently announced the launch of Facebook Lite, a new app that provides users with a stripped-down mobile Facebook experience. Facebook Lite is designed to provide Facebook’s core features such as messages and the timeline to users with slow mobile phones and poor data connections. To accomplish this, Facebook made a few key changes to the app. While the full version of Facebook requires about 35 mb of space on Android, Facebook Lite takes up less than 1 mb. For the app to function on slow networks, Facebook Lite decreased content file sizes. To use significantly less data, Facebook Lite does not run as many background processes. Currently targeting many emerging groups of mobile users in countries such as Bangladesh, Nepal, Nigeria, India, China, and Vietnam, Facebook Lite aims to attract large groups of users who previously could not access the social network on mobile due to bandwidth limitations.
Ultimately, I believe that Facebook attempted to solve two longstanding problems with the creation of Facebook Lite:
1. Low Bandwidth: The majority of new mobile connections every year come out of countries such as China and India (1), and over 875 million people currently access the Internet through 2G signals (2). This slower signal acts as a significant roadblock for mobile users in these areas because typical applications are designed with the characteristics and capacity of 3G and LTE networks in mind. For example, in the United States, mobile users an average of 2 GB of data per month (3). Comparing this to the global average in traffic per smartphone, which is 819 MB/month, highlights that mobile users in the United States are extremely active with their smartphones (4). Cellular networks in the United States have the capacity to handle large amounts of data, whereas networks in developing nations simply can’t.
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2. High Data Costs: The combination of lower overall incomes and higher data prices means that consumers in developing nations pay as much as 12 times the percentage of per capita GDP as US consumers (5). This number is especially ridiculous when you consider that some individuals spend around 10% of their monthly income on their network plans!(6) In the US, on the other hand, the cost of 1MB of data in 2012 was around 3 cents on average (7). This enormous disparity in data costs means that designing apps with users in developed nations such as the United States in mind often makes them extremely difficult for people on slower connections to use. While users in developed nations with low pricing can afford to download hundreds of megabytes of data, individuals in developing nations need streamlined apps that provide content with smaller file sizes. Facebook Lite takes care of this necessity: it loads lower resolution pictures, handles data more efficiently, and removes features that require large amounts of bandwidth such as video. It also eliminates background processes that allowed the full Facebook app to function even while it wasn’t explicitly being used.
In terms of solving for low bandwidth and the high data costs, Facebook appears to have hit the nail on the head with Facebook Lite. Because it requires very little data to transmit content, it saves people money. However, Facebook Lite only addresses half of the problem when it comes to requesting and transmitting content over a mobile network. Facebook Lite considers and solves the problem of what data (size of data, types of data, etc) is being sent/received, but not how that data is transferred. One of the biggest problems with how data is sent/received is the latency in a mobile network. latency is an intrinsic aspect of all mobile networks: big or small, fast or slow.
Twin Prime helps solve for network latency
Twin Prime’s mobile data acceleration solution would go a long way towards solving some the latter half of the data transfer equation in countries with poor mobile networks. We provide custom optimization strategies that ultimately serve to deliver requested content significantly faster through our servers placed throughout the world. For example, we optimize HTTP, HTTPS, and 3rd party requests in order to provide higher data speeds without sacrificing content in any way. Ultimately, our solution tackles latency in the mobile network and optimizes apps to get the most out of the existing infrastructure. High latency is a massive problem in all countries. For example, in the United States, “we are looking at 100-1000ms RTT range on mobile.”(8) (RTT refers to round trip times) This is even worse from a global perspective considering the state of mobile networks and sparse infrastructure in developing countries.
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Dealing with low bandwidth and high data costs in developing nations is a challenge that has many mobile app companies puzzled. In addition to decreasing the amount of data the app needs to function, an effective solution to this challenge must properly handle how data is transmitted. While Facebook Lite successfully provides the Facebook experience at a fraction of the data required by the original app, it doesn’t entirely deal with optimizing how data is transferred.
If you’d like to find out more about Twin Prime and how we accelerate mobile app content, read our product brief.
Text Citations:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/27/mobile-developing-world/
Vijay Shankar: http://news.yahoo.com/facebook-lite-expands-india-philippines-143316195.html
Chetan Sharma: http://www.chetansharma.com/blog/2014/11/10/us-mobile-market-update-q3-2014/
Cisco: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-networking-index-vni/white_paper_c11-520862.html
http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/30/pricey-data-is-a-barrier-to-internet-access-in-developing-countries/
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/27/mobile-developing-world/
Portio Research: https://www.newamerica.org/oti/the-cost-of-connectivity-2014/
Ilya Grigorik: https://www.igvita.com/2012/07/19/latency-the-new-web-performance-bottleneck/
Image Citations:
Facebook Lite Logo: http://www.technobuffalo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/facebook-lite-logo.jpeg
Mobile Data Usage Graph: https://www.techinasia.com/china-low-mobile-data-usage/ , http://trak.in/tags/business/2015/02/19/3g-data-usage-2g/ ,
Map: http://www.twinprime.com/product/
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