The new Facebook Lite application.

Facebook Lite, a new version of Facebook targeted at developing countries in South-East Asia, Latin America and Africa, has officially been launched on Friday. At present, only the Android version of the app is available.

“More than a billion people around the world access Facebook from a number of mobile devices on varying networks,” wrote Vijay Shankar, product manager for FB Lite, in a blog post, “In many areas, networks can be slow and not able to support all the functionality found in Facebook for Android.”

Facebook Lite was built for these situations, giving people a reliable Facebook experience when bandwidth is at a minimum, added Mr. Shankar.

The Facebook Android app is notoriously slow due to the loading of photos and videos while opening the app which might be a frustration for users in low internet speed areas who have a not so high end mobile phone.

Facebook Lite is a much more simplified version of the Facebook mobile app, offering users only few basic features such as comments and photos. This new application takes only 1MB of space on smart phones and is optimized for 2G networks. The app is developed considering phones lacking high-end features which have around 4MB of internal memory and the reduction in content will reduce the cost of data fees to users.

Google has recently announced an optimized search service. Google will automatically detect the data speed and RAM in a system to decide whether or not to run the optimized version.

Countries like India, Indonesia, Brazil and Nigeria are the main target of the app to keep users connected whilst not requiring the latest mobile gadgets.

This strategy may prove advantageous in the long run as this can increase the usability of the platform to numerous nations and also millions of extra visitors of Facebook.

Recently Facebook’s “Internet.org” has been offering free internet in developing countries where the application will be launched so the two services will certainly go hand in hand.