In March of last year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a 3,200-word manifesto, “A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking.” It outlined plans to integrate the company’s portfolio of services-its namesake social network, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp-and increase the emphasis on private messaging over more public sharing. Mired in scandal, embarrassment, and controversy relating to its stewardship of user information and abuse of its network by bad actors, the company sees Messenger as a crucial part of rebuilding trust. LightSpeed’s strategic importance to Facebook runs deeper than any resulting uptick in minutes spent. Like many who contributed to LightSpeed, he adopted a relatively ancient iPhone-an iPhone 6 from 2014–as his personal phone while working on the project, the better to experience Messenger as millions of real people do. “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, a Facebook veteran who’s worked on Messenger since its earliest days. We scrutinized every line of code and every millisecond.” Messenger director of engineering Mohsen AgsenTweaking an app for sprightly performance isn’t just courteous to the folks who use it it’s also good business, since it tends to increase usage. So then the size of the app that you’re about to run next matters.” 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. “Even on a high-end device, you’ll see a little bit more consistency. “On a low-end device, you’ll see very quickly that the performance is visibly different,” says Messenger director of engineering Mohsen Agsen, one of the people responsible for the sweeping rewrite. For them, the old Messenger could be noticeably sluggish. However, plenty of people like to hold onto aging iPhones that may struggle with apps that are too huge. Now, you may not have noticed Messenger getting more portly over the years, especially if you have a new (or at least newish) smartphone with processing power and memory to spare. VP of Messenger Stan Chudnovsky compares the effort to remodeling a house and discovering new problems when contractors open up the walls: “You can only find stuff that is worse than you originally anticipated,” he says. Stan Chudnovsky Code-named “LightSpeed” and announced at Facebook’s F8 conference in April 2019, the new version was originally supposed to ship last year completing it was an even more vast undertaking than Facebook had anticipated. Messenger is going from 1.7 million lines of code to 360,000, for an 84% reduction. (It will arrive in stand-alone form for the rest of us gradually over the coming weeks.)Īs a giant piece of programming, the downsizing is even more dramatic. 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. According to the company, the new version loads twice as fast as the one it’s replacing. By rewriting it from scratch, it’s shrunk Messenger’s footprint on your iPhone down to an eminently manageable 30MB, less than a quarter of its peak size. That’s about twice the size of WhatsApp, another Facebook messaging app that offers many similar features.īut now Facebook has put the iOS version of Messenger on an extreme weight-reduction plan. What had been a wafer-thin 8.5MB download in 2012 expanded to take up 130MB of space on users’ iPhones. As its user base and ambitions grew, so did its size. Along the way, it supplemented its original text-based conversations with everything from voice and video calls to games to payments to bots to Snapchat-style stories.
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