We rolled out Facebook Lite, our version of Facebook for Android built for emerging markets, in June of 2015. The app has hit 100M monthly active users. It’s the fastest-growing version of Facebook to reach 100M users in under 9 months. It has an APK that is less than 1 MB in size, meaning people can download it in seconds on slow connections.

To reach the APK size target, the Lite APK doesn’t have the product code and resources found in a typical Android app. The Lite client is a simple VM that provides various capabilities to interact with the OS (such as read a file, open the camera, create an SQLite database, and so on) and a rendering engine to drive the Android UI. Product code is written on the server and is expressed in terms of the capabilities the client has. Resources are sent down from the server as needed and cached. So it has infinite scalability for building additional product without bloating the APK.

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