Facebook Messenger on iOS Redesigned to Be Clutter-Free, 2x Faster

Facebook has rebuilt the Messenger app for iOS from the ground upwardly, as part of its 'Project LightSpeed' revamp, which the company says will make for a "faster, smaller, and simpler" app that volition "load twice as fast and exist i-fourth its original size." The new version of the app has only started rolling out on the App Store in the The states and will be bachelor globally over the next few weeks. There'south no give-and-take on when (or if) the Android version of the app will receive a similar treatment.

According to an official blog postal service from Facebook, the conclusion to redesign the app was taken considering how swollen it had go because of all the features that had been incorporated over the years. The redesigned app, co-ordinate to the company, will not only assist users by being faster and more responsive merely as well helps the company'due south engineers because they won't have to build new experiences from the ground upwardly.

As part of the revamp process, Facebook states it reduced Messenger's core code by 84 percent, bringing it downward from 1.7+ meg lines of code to just 360,000. The company also states that information technology rebuilt the app's features to fit a new simplified infrastructure. The deletion of a massive amount of lawmaking, however, means that a few of the Messenger's existing features volition exist 'temporarily' unavailable, although, the visitor says information technology'due south working to reintroduce them sooner rather than later.

Co-ordinate to Facebook's engineering weblog post, the company's developers achieved the seemingly impossible chore of redesigning the whole app from the ground upwardly "by using the native OS wherever possible, reusing the UI with dynamic templates powered by SQLite, using SQLite as a universal organization, and building a server broker to operate every bit a universal gateway between Messenger and its server features." The company further mentions that redesigned codebase will also lay the foundation for private messaging and interoperability across apps.