Messenger Lite will be available initially to people in Kenya, Tunisia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Venezuela, and is set to come to other countries later.Today we’re thrilled to introduce video chat in Messenger Lite, a slimmed down version of Messenger for Android that offers the core features of the app while giving everyone the opportunity to stay connected to their friends and family, intended for people with older Android devices and/or slower Internet connections. 'WhatsApp is awesome and we love that people use it all the time, but it doesn't mean that on Messenger we shouldn't try to allow anyone to use it to efficiently be able to do it,' he said. 'Even once we have connectivity, we're still going to have to deal with cheap devices,' he said.įacebook also owns messaging service WhatsApp, which has historically been popular in the developing world, but that popularity hasn't affected the decision to reconfigure Messenger for the same market, Chudnovsky said. Chudnovsky said that he's 'very optimistic' that network infrastructure in developing countries will catch up with the rest of the world quickly and that Facebook is committed to supporting Messenger Lite far into the future to ensure it can keep running on older phones. Messenger Lite has been designed to work on Android devices from as far back as 2009, running the Gingerbread version of Google's phone software that was prevalent around that time. 'People want to use the same kind of services they use everywhere else, but it definitely requires different types of tech.'

As a huge growth area for Facebook - 300 million people use Messenger for voice calling - it is a feature Chudnovsky is 'definitely' looking at adding eventually. One thing Messenger Lite won't be able to do is make voice calls, in this first version at least.

Messenger lite android