Facebook has shrunk the iOS version of Messenger App Size Down By 75 per cent to make its iPhone messaging app run better especially on older phones.
Facebook has rewritten the app t from scratch. It has shrunk Messenger’s footprint on iPhone down to an eminently manageable 30MB, less than a quarter of its peak size. The app will roll out in stand-alone form for the rest of the Operating systems gradually over the coming weeks.
The app still looks a lot like the old messenger and is simpler still. It removes the Discover tab which showcased businesses with a Messenger presence. It also revamps the People tab with a splashier look and greater emphasis on the stories feature.
Following a post by Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerburg “We’ve completely rewritten Messenger to get a lot faster. Starting today, we’ll be rolling out the new Messenger app for iOS. Once the rollout is complete, Messenger will be one quarter the size and load twice as fast. When you open Messenger throughout the day, it will feel much faster and more responsive compared to other apps you use.”
The new version loads twice as fast as the one it’s replacing. The update is so compact that Facebook was able to quietly build it into the existing version and test it by exposing it to a subset of users.
“On a low-end device, you’ll see very quickly that the performance of the new version is visibly different,” says Messenger director of engineering Mohsen Agsen, one of the people responsible for the sweeping rewrite. “Even on a high-end device, you’ll see a little bit more consistency. A high-end device starts behaving like a low-end device. If you’ve just finished running a big game or loading the camera and the phone is under memory pressure. So then the size of the app that you’re about to run next matters.”
Given that people may hop in and out of Messenger dozens of times a day. Zippy performance is an overarching imperative, contends Agsen. If Facebook’s family of apps is like a lineup of cars, he says, “some of them are the sedans, and they need to be the sedans. We really felt that messaging really should be more of the sports car, dominated by speed and reliability at its core.”
“We know that every time we make Messenger faster and simpler, it’s easier for people to communicate and they use it more,” says VP of engineering Raymond Endres.
