Facebook Lite sees some heavy growth one year after launch

Its full version is already the third most trafficked website online, but Facebook isn’t stopping its quest for world domination at only developed nations. Last year, the social media giant launched Facebook Lite, an app designed to give people a “faster experience on slower mobile networks,” and 12 months later, the app has met with quite a bit of success in a number of countries where high speed internet is a rare commodity.

According to a new study from Similar Web, African countries see the greatest Facebook Lite usage, although the top user is Timor-Leste, located to the east of Indonesia, with Comoros and Madagascar taking the next two spots. In Timor-Leste, a whopping 64.61 percent of all Android users open the app daily, whereas over a third of Comoros and Madagascar residents are regular users of the app.

Moreover, in Equatorial Guinea, Comoros, and Timor Leste, users open Facebook Lite more often than they do the regular Facebook app, demonstrating just how prevalent this less data-heavy version is becoming. Indeed, because Facebook Lite purports to work “in all network conditions,” the app has seen considerable penetration in various global markets, with users in South America and Southeast Asia also frequenting this version.

And while users may have been skeptical at first with Facebook Lite, Similar Web’s study shows just how quickly adoption rates increased over the last year. While just 0.5 percent of Android devices in India had the app installed in June 2015, by May of this year, this number had grown over 16-fold, with 8.69 percent of Android users installing the app.

Of course, Facebook Lite hasn’t had as much traction in countries like the U.S., U.K., and Australia, but still, download numbers have increased steadily since the app’s initial launch. In just one year, the app saw an installation growth of 1,200 percent, but even so, only 0.26 percent of U.S. Android devices have downloaded Facebook Lite.