Facebook Announces Faster and Smaller iOS Messenger App
Facebook rolling out the new version of iOS Messenger and developed it faster, smaller, and simpler.
The company rebuilt the architecture and rewrote the entire codebase, which is an incredibly rare undertaking and involved engineers from across the company.
As compared with the previous iOS version, this new Messenger is twice as fast to start and is one-fourth the size, and developers reduce the Messenger code by 84 percent, from more than 1.7M lines to 360,000.
"We accomplished this by using the native OS wherever possible, reusing the UI with dynamic templates powered by SQLite, using SQLite as a universal system, and building a server broker to operate as a universal gateway between Messenger and its server features."
"We know how much speed and reliability matter when you’re having conversations with family and friends throughout the day, so we redesigned the app with those in mind." said Facebook engineers.
- Faster: A faster start time may not matter as much if you only open an app once or twice a day to play a game or watch a movie, but it makes a huge difference when you open an app many times a day to respond to messages from the people who matter most.
- Smaller: A smaller app means Messenger starts, downloads and updates faster for everyone, including people who use the app on older devices or in areas with lower connectivity where every kilobyte counts.
- Simpler: We’ve streamlined the app while keeping it rich with features and making it easier for our engineers to build better experiences. For instance, we’ve reduced the contact list from 40 versions to one that works consistently across the app. This not only helps with the cognitive load for people, but it also means engineers don’t need to build new experiences from the ground up.
"To make it faster and smaller was no easy feat when more than one billion people rely on Messenger. We reduced Messenger’s core code by 84 percent – going from 1.7+ million lines of code to 360,000 – and company rebuilt the features to fit a new simplified infrastructure."
As part of the rebuild, a few features will be temporarily unavailable, but the Facebook is working to bring them back soon.