Total of 1.44 billion users globally.
By Dileep Thekkethil
BENGALURU: Facebook has reached yet another milestone as it crossed 125 million users in India, which is the second largest user base of the social networking giant.
According to the California-based giant, it had a user base of 112 million till the end of last year and now the average number of registered users in India has risen to 125 million. Facebook currently has 1.44 billion active users across the world, which makes it the world’s biggest social networking site.
Vijay Shankar, the Head of Products told PTI, “In India, Facebook has 125 million average users (MAU) while the number of mobile MAUs stands at 114 million. On a daily basis, 59 million users in India are accessing Facebook and 53 million are accessing us from their mobile phones.”
Facebook today launched the Facebook Lite app for low-end android smartphones that work on 2G network, which will become handy for its users in India and Philippines. The Facebook app has a very high popularity in India but, many times people find it consuming a lot of data, which in 2G network makes the connection dragging.
In a country like India that has smartphone users who are yet to taste the speed of 3G, Facebook Lite app will help in further improving Facebook userbase.
The normal Facebook App for android devices will eat up a mindboggling 250 MB from the smartphone internal storage but, when it comes to the new Facebook Lite app the size becomes a mere 430 kb. Though users cannot enjoy all the facilities and features offered in the normal app, the lite version of Facebook will have they key features such as News Feed, Status Updates, Push Notifications and Messages
Vijay said, “We will get to video soon… In India over 80% of the users are on the 2G network. We have worked on improving the apps performance even on spotty connections and across devices from entry-spec devices to high-end ones.”
He added “During the development phase, the team behind the app spent a lot of time on the ground traveling across India to test and check the performance of the app.”
Android users in India and Philippines can download the lite version of Facebook from Google Paly Store. For those who intend to install it manually, there are APKs of the Facebook lite available to download.
Facebook is expected to roll out the same in other emerging markets in the coming weeks.