How we built Facebook Lite for every Android phone and network | Hacker News Reader

How we built Facebook Lite for every Android phone and network

code.facebook.com

140 pointsobliviscence106 comments

Anyone else find that they love FB engineering and FB research, but don't like the product much?

FB does so much awesome technical stuff, and often shares/open-sources it. But the actual FB site -- for me, at least -- is lacklustre. The only thing it really shines for is event management.

This said, I guess anyone who reads HN is likely to be an outlier; and the site's success evidently means a lot of people like it.

Events-wise I think most good engineers/product people would add proper ticketing as well as mind body online style booking etc. for classes etc.

It could be a huge business for Facebook if they could be bothered.

Even a huge engineering events business would be a rounding error for Facebook.

I mean all events, not sure what you mean by engineering events?

However, I just looked... and they make so much more than I ever imagined. Who are these people clicking Facebook ads, or is it so amazing at targeting me I haven't noticed myself clicking.

A regular events business, not an engineering events business. They could squash TicketMaster if they wanted to.

Exactly, and eventbrite; gotta be worth the investment/maintenance cost I'm guessing.

This. I killed off my FB account years ago and have not had the tiniest regret. But they do amazing things, and I love keeping tabs on what they are open sourcing.

It's worse than lackluster, IMO: it's downright confusing and nonsensical. To someone who uses it every single day and spends a lot of time there, I can see how they would become accustomed to the UI, but if you're an occasional user it's not easy to use at all. Also, it changes frequently so every time you come back things will be different.

Worse, every time I try to use it, it seems like everything on the page is jumping around; it takes too long to render and scrolling isn't smooth, so it's impossible to just smoothly scroll down and see everything. But I see that on a lot of sites these days.

A lot of their stuff makes me ask why bother, HHVM comes to mind. Even React at times seems like serious overkill.

> A lot of their stuff makes me ask why bother, HHVM comes to mind.

What about HHVM makes you think that? Producing an optimised version of PHP is easier than moving from PHP to another language.

Some of their engineering is good. Saying "nothing meets our scale" as an excuse for everything is just silly though

The Facebook site itself has lots of bugs also. For example, basic navigation was broken for months (perhaps it still is). The back-button was completely useless.

I really don't understand why they don't fix the problems on their own website first.

I have been too well trained by the modern internet not to use the back button to have noticed.

I don't think I understand. I use and develop for the modern web all day every day, and I use the back button all the time. I was thinking maybe you're referring to highly interactive interfaces that use e.g. Angular, React, et. al., but even those generally use push-state to maintain back-button functionality by synchronizing the state of the app with the browser.

I think he is jokingly referring to the fact that so many "modern" sites break the back button without a second thought that many of us have simply stopped using the back button as a result of this.

This. I regularly use Facebook mobile website on my quite powerful smartphone. Basic UX functions are lacking there though they are possible .

Facebook engineering is over-engineering the whole application across multiple platforms but can't fix many usability issues and add missing features on many of them. Finally a like/action, comments around a few hundred "friends" with text, audio and video shouldn't require that much effort. I mostly suspect they over engineer because they can! namely too much money can buy too much talent and skills. But maybe they don't need that much.

We've had an ex-employee with access to a client's page for close to a year now because every time we try and remove him we just get the generic "an error has occurred, sorry" message.

Contacting support lead to something like "Thanks for your report. While we don't have time to investigate or address every problem that's reported, we take all problems seriously. Please try again at a later date to see if this issue has been resolved."

I get that we're extremely small fish in Facebook's eyes, but I would've thought reselling $30k/mo in ad inventory would at least get us some way to have these issues resolved for their clients.

That said, I can't say Google is all that much better.

I am deeply suspicious of Facebook the company (not just because Zuckerberg's early attitude towards users and privacy). I absolutely love Facebook's open source efforts.

This contradiction made it really weird to get started with React. It still makes me feel dirty sometimes.

If you are an engineer I can tell you most of the things you care about product-wise, consumers don't care about. This mentally, which myself I suffer from, is the reason many fail to build things that people love.

Yeah, this is kind of what I was going for when I mentioned HN readers being outliers. FB doesn't do much for me, but evidently it does a lot for most consumers, because it's damned popular.

I still laugh at their hack to get around Android's method count limit.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th...

They go through all this reverse engineering before they go back to usual solution of code stripping with ProGuard.

And then continue on with more crazy hacks.

FB engineering is usually impressive feats but questionable motives. "Wow you sure fit that square peg through that round hole. That's ...impressive"

"Move fast and do things not quite the way they should really be done"

Why laugh? We were already using proguard heavily. We eventually hit build perf issues and had to patch it too (https://github.com/facebook/proguard)

Do you think we wanted to do a crazy runtime patch and didn't explore every other short/medium-term option? Do you think we wanted to write our own build system (Buck)? Or our own JS view layer (React)? Our own PHP virtual machine (HHVM)? Our own database (Presto/RocksDB)? Our own IDE (Nuclide)?

You "laughing" tells me you have never worked on a large codebase with hundreds of engineers shipping very quickly, so you can't empathize with the sort of problems that come up.

Btw, every time Google Apps hit the limit they merely bumped the limit in AOSP and dropped support for old OS versions...

You had hundreds of engineers cramming stuff into a mobile app, till it didn't fit. Then you apparently had to make an entirely new version of it since people in much of the world couldn't even download the thing.

That sounds laugh worthy to me.

I also work at a large company that has had its own mobile development "issues", and I found those plenty humorous as well.

You're right. I've never worked or will work in a place where a PHP virtual machine is the correct answer. I'm certain I can't empathize with that situation.

I am loving what Facebook is doing and even considered buy stock at one point. That being said, I don't really use the product Facebook all too often, though I am interested to see where it is going.

I shall gaze from afar.

Facebook is still the flakiest and crash-prone app on my phone bar none

I remember a chat I had with a colleague about 6 years ago. He posited that I would be really excited to work at FB since it was such a fast growing company with all these interesting problems. I responded that I couldn't understand what he was talking about, there really wasn't much interesting going on outside of some graph analytics at the time and that problem had a pretty limited life-span given FB's particular use-cases.

There's been very little really truly interesting blue-sky technical work at FB that's I'm aware of other than trying to figure out how to get around pretty prosaic issues through clever hackery rather than just doing it some other already established way and trying to figure out how to exploit their user-base for targeted ads (which by many accounts from folks I know aren't all that great w/r to ROI).

The more interesting stuff seems to be happening in their acquisitions like WhatsApp and Oculus, but the "Facebook stink" feels like it's already starting to get to those teams as well.

I honestly have almost no idea what their 13,000 employees must be doing outside of data center operations and various O&M projects at this point. Building quality mobile client software definitely doesn't seem to be it.

What I find immensely interesting is how they're pulling in around $11/user/year (about $4 in pure profit)! Their economy of scale is pretty good considering it only costs them about $7/user/year to run the service. I'd easily pay $10/year for a service like FB that didn't entirely suck and had all my friends on it.

> What I find immensely interesting is how they're pulling in around $11/user/year (about $4 in pure profit)! Their economy of scale is pretty good considering it only costs them about $7/user/year to run the service. I'd easily pay $10/year for a service like FB that didn't entirely suck and had all my friends on it.

If you're not blocking facebook ads, they're making far more money from you than $10/yr. There's a huge difference in the value of different eyeballs and anyone on HN is probably worth significantly more than average to advertisers.

$11/user/yr is tiny for a social network that is many people's primary communication tool, it's only going to get bigger as facebook growth levels off and mobile continues to monetize better.

I use this because the main facebook app had bloated to taking over 300mb of my android phone.

Unfortunately I can't get it through google play (not available in the UK) so I have to manually download and keep the apk updated. I wish they'd enable it for all countries.

The separate messenger app is also going that way, hopefully they'll eventually create a Messenger Lite app too.

I use the http version at http://m.facebook.com/

None of those pesky permissions like snooping through my contacts

I use FaceSlim which goes through the mobile version and is open source. I installed it through F-Droid.

Also messenger works on the mobile web version while it does not in the native app, requiring an even more intrusive and abusive separate app.

When Facebook first released an app, I downloaded it to my Android phone and it borked my contacts so badly that I've never logged into the app again (can't remove it from my Galaxy S6 without rooting). For every person in my Facebook friends list, it added an entry into my Google contacts list without asking. That's on top of all the reading of contacts, which feels far less invasive to me.

It's usually possible to display contacts from only certain apps/sources in your contacts.

That may depend on what brand phone you have though, but my Lenovo and my Huawai used to be able to do it.

On Android 6.0, Facebook must ask you for accessing your contacts, location and doing most sensitive stuff. You can deny it those things and the app will keep on function normally. To their credit, Facebook is a lot quicker to update their app to work with the more restrictive Android 6.0 permission model than others.

Combine that with something like Greenify that will stop the app from doing stuff in the background and killing your battery, and it's actually a better experience than the mobile website. It's just insane on how much you must tame the application to be acceptable to use. Wish Facebook engineers would take note of how bloated and overreaching their app is by default.

Bloated, overreaching, battery killing and permission hoarding could be used to describe 90% of apps on Play Market.

I hold the Facebook engineers to a higher standard than the developers of those 90%. In fact I hold them to a higher standard than most engineers.

I hope you mean software engineers. A lot of engineering is life-or-death and intended to potentially last for centuries.

The sad truth is that the 10% that _don't_ do this are the lone wolf / indie devs or small shops focusing on a single app. It's the large corps that _should_ be held to a higher standard but aren't, and take advantage of this fact to data mine the shit out of their customers.

For some reason every bank on the planet needs to know my location, send/receive text messages on my behalf and listen to my microphone in order to display a damned account balance.

Also, the mobile web site also provides notifications through Chrome's Push API these days.

I really like this wrapper app : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.jakelane.wr...

Because being logged in with FB in the browser tracks what sites you visit (or at least it did).

Facebook seems to be the AOL of this decade.

A very apt comparison. AOL put out some stuff that was very well done technically but didn't necessarily catch on for the long term, for example AOLServer.

Never heard of AOLServer - pretty interesting read on Wikipedia! Thanks.

Exactly this. It's the internet for people who don't realise there is an internet.

Tinfoil is a great lean Android Facebook client https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.danvelazco...

Seconded.

Tinfoil is great. It's basically just a wrapper app for the mobile site but it basically allows much greater control over what data you want FB to have access to.

In my case, nothing.

Thirded. Very rarely I need to open the full desktop site in my mobile browser to get something to work properly but for my casual checking of FB once or twice a week, Tinfoil is perfect.

You don't need the Facebook messenger app or a Messenger Lite app.

Just install "Trillian"; it does Facebook messaging, plus a bunch of other networks, and is fast and low-resource.

Wow, I used to use Trillian in when I was in high school (somewhere around 2002). I'm surprised and impressed that it's still a thing!

There's https://www.facebook.com/lite/ and https://touch.facebook.com/ too. But I guess that wont allow them to mine their users for phones for contacts and other interesting data.

The web version won't be as compact, because it has to use HTML/CSS/JS and so can't shift as much rendering burden onto the server. It also has to use HTTP, which is less efficient over the network.

Did you RTFA? https://www.facebook.com/lite/ is what this article is about...

Yes, but this got a bit messy to me. Facebook Lite used to be was a regular (but light) web page[1]. Now they seem to have converted the Lite web page brand into an app. An app that requires access to your contacts[2], among other things.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130624002458/https://www.lite....

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.l...

There is still https://mbasic.facebook.com/ so it has just been renamed.

Not just renamed. It used to look like this, a decent desktop UI: https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/2ni4mjt...

That's the version you get when you go to Facebook in Opera Mini. (Which I've done recently from a Windows Mobile 6 device)

"for every Android phone"*

* in selected countries.

HTTPS and HTML were designed on a NeXT with 24MHz CPU and less than 64MB RAM over a 56kbs connection. Yet these technologies are considered too heavy for a Galaxy Y with 600MHz CPU, and 290MB RAM over a 500kbs connection. Instead facebook needs to invent a proprietary wire protocol and layout engine.

I thought it was more to do with the latency of mobile networks that they invented their own protocol.

I think you can use https keep alive to only require one tcp connection.

If you're on Android consider using FaceSlim[1]

It wraps the http version in a very nice fashion gives you configurable message notifications, offline browsing. Allows you to disable images and other niceties.

There's an extensive changelog on the github page, and you're free to add new features if you feel like it.

[1] https://github.com/indywidualny/FaceSlim

There's Tinfoil for Facebook and Metal too.

Sounds interesting, probably going to give it a try.

That's what I use. Very fast - enables you to disable images (and adverts) to speed things up. Also uses CSS to create a night-mode with a black background.

If APK is just a VM sitting on top of Android system, perhaps it could be used for just about any project? Maybe even integrated into Android OS.

To "install" the app you would just provide link to your production server to the Android OS and it would appear on homescreen.

I would love to see them open source this.

This is close to the model that Chrome is moving towards (Google FlipKart Lite to check out an example).

You might also be interested in exponentjs.com, they're building what you describe using React Native.

Sounds very much like Opera Mini, a thin client web browser for similar markets. (I remember using Mini a ton at school over 2G, it was the only browser usable on EDGE.)

What does "Over half the world’s population, at least 1.6 billion people..." mean? Which is it? Google says the world population was over 7 billion in 2013, this sentence confuses me greatly.

I think they're talking about the world's internet connected population, which is about 3 billion[1].

[1] http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/

Personally I need something in the middle. The original Facebook app is taking over 300mb, and this one is going to stay under 1Mb. I would love a 10-20mb, I am using Facebook Lite now but it does give much more value than visiting the website directly.

Sure it does! Oh, you mean more value to you, not to Facebook? :D

Facebook lite is really nice on Android. I leave it running all the time and unless the app is in the foreground, it uses virtually no battery.

I wish there was an iOS version.

As iOS devices are premium, having a Lite version wouldn't serve Facebook any good. I'm pretty sure they get most of their mobile revenue from iOS devices.

Actually, Android users surpassed iPhone users on Facebook back at the end of 2012. I haven't heard that they're not displaying ads on the Lite version, so that shouldn't have an impact. That said, I've noticed that the battery drain doesn't seem to be as bad on an iPhone when compared to the drain in Android (which is why I uninstalled that app a while ago).

Well whatsapp is pretty popular in these slow connection countries facebook is talking about even if it has ~30MB apk size. Guess what, people are ok with it. I think reducing apk size to <1 MB by creating a VM on android thereby compromising on UX aspects of app is not a very good idea.

But this approach sounds like a new architecture of building android application which gives more control on server side since have core logic there.

The thing being described is basically a custom web browser.

Is that a bad thing?

It's not a bad thing. It's just a conceptual complexity reduction, folding it into an already known concept.

I hear things like virtual machine on the client, sending a UI DOM over the wire, executing most application code on the server - but it's a long-winded description of a web browser. Using different technologies for the slots, but basically an isomorphic thing.

Why is the standard Facebook apk so large?

it's probably one of the most over engineered "enterprisey" piece of software ever created. The was an article a couple months back about how the app had more than 19000 Java Classes. A lot of them were auto generated i think. I have no idea how a code base ends up that bloated.

It's so bloated that the app has to hack into the Dalvik VM so that it won't crash from the huge number of classes.

Author of the blog here, happy to answer any questions.

Sounds awesome, yet still not available in Play Store in Australia. Which is why I'm using Metal, or just the web browser. The full app brings my S6 Edge to its knees.

http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/facebook-2/lite/

Keep in mind that this is not the official release location, so caveat emptor.

Thanks!

> less than 1 MB in size, meaning people can download it in seconds on slow connections

No. 1 MB downloads in seconds on most connections; slow connections will be closer to half a minute than to 'seconds'.

This is why the Facebook app is so bloated in the first place, assumptions about connections and devices in the majority of the world.

IMO, half a minute falls within "seconds". If I had to cut it somewhere, I'd think it would be in 45 or 50 seconds, at which point I would call it almost a minute. But then again, colloquial english.

Still. The point is that this does not take several minutes to download, and thus is unlikely to fail. And that's a huge achievment on Android. Applications that do very little can very easily get to 5 or 10MB. Facebook does quite a lot, and the benefits of doing that with only 1MB are obvious.

Maybe it was a typo and they meant "minutes" instead of "seconds"? Later in the article they say:

> Downloading a typical app with 20 MB APK can take more than 30 minutes on a 2G network

Then again overstating accomplishments is pretty standard for tech blog posts.

Does it have less than 4000 classes?

4K classes is not much if you've included a few libraries.

Sounds awesome. Here's hoping for more Lite apps!

"Samsung Galaxy Y comes with very restrictive specs of 290 MB RAM, 600 MHz processor, and 180 MB internal memory."

In what universe is a 600MHz CPU and 290MB of RAM restrictive for a glorified RSS reader?

"... like the Samsung Galaxy Y comes with very restrictive specs of 290 MB RAM, 600 MHz processor, and 180 MB internal memory. " I'm feeling old when I'm seeing that these are restrictive specs...

Wonder if they're employing a middle out data compression algorithm...

Could they spend some of this time and effort on the website, itself? I don't need yet another app trying to take over the world via my phone.

Well, not "every Android phone". It's not compatible with my Nexus 5X according to the Play store.

Or presumably any of the millions of Android devices without the Google Play Store.

... and just yesterday I deleted facebook messenger because it drained my battery before 11am. (android)

iOS app is ridiculously bad! It's gigantic, monolithic battery drainer! In combination with Messenger I think it is awesome how bad those products are. Twitter is not much better with app. And their site for mobile looks like it hasn't been updtated since creation.

Hmm, pushing a compressed ui tree sounds a bit like Xorg. Doesn't it?

The main product is a social experiment, made possible by a sociopath and exploits human social relationships and interactions for profit.

Hmm. I partly agree, but "a sociopath"? That seems a bit much...

Flinging around a term like "sociopath" about a specific person is a breach of HN's civility rules. Please don't do that again.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11252782 and marked it off-topic.

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