Facebook Messenger for iOS is now faster, smaller, and simpler.
The updated app—which promises to load twice as quickly as and take up a fraction of the space of the original—is rolling out “over the next few weeks.”
“We know how much speed and reliability matter when you’re having conversations with family and friends throughout the day, so we redesigned the app with those in mind,” Raymond Endres, VP of engineering for Messenger, wrote in a blog announcement.
Internally known as Project LightSpeed, the improvements
A more petite platform means speedier starts, downloads, and updates—even for users with older devices or in areas with lower connectivity.
“We’ve streamlined the app while keeping it rich with features and making it easier for our engineers to build better experiences,” Endres boasted.
That includes reducing Messenger’s core code by 84 percent—from 1.7-plus million lines of code to only 360,000—and rebuilding features to fit the newly simplified infrastructure.
“Fewer lines of code makes the app lighter and more responsive, and a streamlined code base means engineers can innovate more quickly,” according to Endres.
During renovation, some (unspecified) features may be temporarily unavailable; the firm is “working to bring them back soon.”
Messenger debuted as a standalone app in 2011, quickly gaining features like payments, camera effects, Stories, GIFs, and video chat. But with great power comes great responsibility, and the full-featured messaging service was getting bogged down.
A 2018 revamp helped simplify the interface, but the company “wanted to do even more.”
“We looked at how we would build a messaging app today if we were starting from scratch,” Facebook’s engineering blog said. “What had changed since we first began developing Messenger nearly a decade earlier? Quite a lot, it turns out.”
Which is why, at the F8 2019 developer’s conference, Facebook announced Project LightSpeed.
There is no word on whether the same changes will eventually be made to the Android or Web apps.
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