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Comment by davidu | Hacker News Reader

It requires a special kind of engineer and PM to dedicate the time and skill required to make things like this work when most of the rest of the company is working to take advantage of the bleeding edge of technology.

Hats off to that person or team!

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This is their mid-quality mobile web version (predominantly for smartphone users with non-native apps), they actively maintain it alongside all of their other platforms (including two other quality mobile web versions for less and greater bandwidth).

I think the mentality is about accessibility, not technology, it's just that a lot of what gets focused on coming out of the company is from the high-tech side.

They also have a "lite" app that can only be installed if you access the Android Play store from an Asian IP or similar.

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

I wonder why they bother segregating it like that though. I would love to give it a spin, as i have found their main app to be hogging the CPU one too many times lately.

You can download the apk and it will work on any phone. So you can either trust somewhere like http://www.apkmirror.com/ or use one of the various methods of ripping the apk from the play store.

I use lite for notifications because my phone has limited space and I find the website to be good enough.

About those notifications, apparently Opera Mini support them now.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.opera.mini...

Not sure i am a fan of their new interface though, and it is a proxy browser (pages get pre-processed on a Opera run server).

I think this version of the product makes sense if you're making a mega-mass-market product, which for the web pretty much means Google and Facebook. I doubt it would be worth a Pinterest or even an Airbnb to try to squeeze this much juice out of their product.

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