10/23/2023 0 Comments Request feature lightspeed systemsSo we stepped back and looked at how we could apply what we’ve learned over the past decade and what we know about the needs of the people on our apps today. The simplest way to get a smaller app would have been to strip away many of the features we’ve added over the years, but it was important to us to keep all the most used features, like group video calling. Editing a few sections of code wasn’t going to be enough. When we started thinking about this new version, Messenger’s core codebase had grown to more than 1.7 million lines of code. A small app is also easier to manage, update, test, and optimize. With that principle in mind, we began looking at the right way to make our iOS app significantly smaller.Ī small application downloads, installs, updates, and starts faster for the person using it, regardless of the device type or network conditions. Fundamentally, a messaging app should be one of the smallest, lightest-weight apps on your phone. But messages are just tiny snippets of text that take less than a second to send. Those apps take up a lot of storage space, battery time, etc., and the trade-off makes sense. Some apps are immersive (video streaming, gaming) people spend hours using them. We started with the premise that Messenger needed to be a simple, lightweight utility. *According to internal tests using production data This work has helped us advance our own state-of-the-art technologies and the new codebase is designed to be sustainable and scalable for the next decade, laying the foundation for private messaging and interoperability across apps. With this new iteration, we’ve reimagined how Messenger thinks about building apps and started from the ground up with a new client core and a new server framework. Compared with the previous iOS version, Messenger is twice as fast to start* and one-fourth the size. Starting today, we are excited to roll out the new version of Messenger on iOS globally over the next few weeks. In addition, we were able to leverage state-of-the-art technology that we’ve developed over the intervening years. This rewrite allowed us to make use of significant advancements in the mobile app space since the original app launched in 2011. To build this new version of Messenger, we needed to rebuild the architecture from the ground up and rewrite the entire codebase. Which is why, at F8 last year, we announced our intention to make Messenger’s iOS app faster, smaller, and simpler. In fact, the way mobile apps are written has fundamentally changed. What had changed since we first began developing Messenger nearly a decade earlier? Quite a lot, it turns out. We looked at how we would build a messaging app today if we were starting from scratch. In 2018, we redesigned and simplified the interface with the release of Messenger 4. That and the large amount of code made the app’s cold start much slower, especially on older devices - and with nine different tabs, it was trickier for the people using it to navigate. At its peak, the app’s binary size was greater than 130 MB. The back end that was required to help us build, test, and manage all those features made the app far more complex. But with more than one billion people using Messenger every month, the full-featured messaging app that looked simple on the surface was far more complex behind the scenes. Since then, we’ve added payments, camera effects, Stories, GIFs, and even video chat capabilities. At that time, our goal was to build the most feature-rich experience possible for our users. Messenger first became a standalone app in 2011.
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