Facebook Messenger for iOS is now twice as fast, one fourth the size

Facebook has rebuilt the Messenger app for iOS from the ground up. The company has been working on a rewrite of the code since last year, and it called this Project LightSpeed. That tells you what the primary driver has been: to make the app faster.

And that it is. Facebook says it's twice as fast to launch than it used to be, and it's also just one fourth the size. The company has somehow realized that it's incredibly important for messaging apps to be fast to load, because people don't just open them once or twice a day, but dozens if not hundreds of times.

The app is now simpler too, while "rich with features" it's easier for Facebook's engineers to build better experiences. The contact list has been reduced from 40 versions to one that works consistently across the app - and not one moment too soon.

Messenger's core code was reduced from 1.7 million lines to 360,000, which means it's now lighter and more responsive. As part of the rebuild, some unnamed features may be temporarily unavailable, but they should be back soon.

This new version of Messenger also lays the foundation to fulfill Facebook's vision of unifying its messaging apps in the future.

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