Instagram Lite is rolling out in 170 countries — no Reels support for now
The technology behind Instagram Lite
Facebook’s team has managed to squeeze a lot of Instagram’s functionality into theLite app, despite its reduced size. While the main app is sized at 30MB on download, the Lite app is just 2MB.
Instagram Lite doesn’t have AR-based stickers and effects in order to reduce the size. The team also removed some transition animations to decrease the load time of stories and feed.
It also uses some tools utilized to build Facebook Lite, such as SizeBot to keep the size of the files used in the project under check. To learn more about these tools, you can read our feature on how Facebook built its Lite apphere.
[Read:How Facebook crammed all its major features into a 2MB Lite app]
In addition to these tools,Instagram Lite also optimizes image quality. It’s using a different version of JPEG for compression so that images load faster. Plus, it’s using CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) to store some assets to reduce the load time.
The next step for Instagram Lite team is to roll out support for dark mode and Reels worldwide.
You can download the app fromhere.
Story byIvan Mehta
Ivan covers Big Tech, India, policy, AI, security, platforms, and apps for TNW. That’s one heck of a mixed bag. He likes to say “Bleh.“Ivan covers Big Tech, India, policy, AI, security, platforms, and apps for TNW. That’s one heck of a mixed bag. He likes to say “Bleh.”
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