Facebook for Android: now faster, smaller, less data-hungry

To figure out how to improve its Facebook for Android app, Facebook engineers traveled to Africa to test the app on a low-bandwidth network.

They ate through their monthly data plan in 40 minutes.

So developers worked to make Facebook for Android less reliant on data and more logical for users in countries that don’t have major data plans. The company also made the app itself smaller, taking up less room on the phone.

Facebook Engineer Alex Sourov blogged about the trip, and talked about how Facebook for Android needed to use up less data:

We realized that data is extremely expensive in emerging markets, and purchasing more data is often a laborious process.