Over the past couple of years, "lite" versions of applications have become fairly popular in emerging markets with slower data connections. Facebook took charge of this initiative in October with the release of Messenger Lite, and the app is now expanding to the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Ireland.
Messenger Lite initially debuted in Tunisia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and Venezuela, and its main goal was to pack in the core Messenger experience into an application that was considerably lighter and used less data than its regular counterpart.
The overall look of the app has the same general UI as the proper Messenger, but the feature set has been stripped down to regular Messenger conversations, the ability to make Wi-Fi calls, send stickers and photo attachments, and converse in group chats. There aren't any in-chat games, automated messaging services, or an option to update your status with photos/videos that disappear after 24-hours.
Facebook is targeting Messenger Lite to teens and other individuals that would like to take advantage of Facebook Messenger while retaining some of their data buckets for the month, and I'll personally be replacing the regular Messenger app with the Lite version as soon as I wrap up this article. I use Messenger on a daily basis to stay in touch with friends and family that live and die by the service, but I have zero need for all of the bloat that's been added over the years.
If you're interested in giving the 10Mb Messenger Lite a try, you can download it now from the Google Play Store.
