Facebook rolls out stripped-down version of its app to more countries

Following a quiet rollout in a handful of countries, Facebook's stripped-down, data-efficient Android app is finally ready for primetime.

The social network officially launched Facebook Lite, the barebones version of its app, in Asia on Thursday. The company said it will roll out more broadly in Europe, Latin America and Africa "in the coming weeks."

Facebook's lightweight version aims to provide "a reliable Facebook experience when bandwidth is at a minimum," the company wrote in a statement Thursday. People in areas with slow or unreliable network connections will still be able to use core parts of Facebook — including News Feed, messages, photos and notifications — while stripping out more bandwidth-hungry parts of the user experience like Facebook Messenger, for example. Read more...