[ad_1]
is another addition to the company’s “Lite” apps, which target phones with limited specs and regions with poor connectivity.
The company initially launched Instagram Lite in India last December. Last month, it introduced coil support in the app. However, unfortunately this support is only limited to users in India, and the global version will not have this feature at this time.
It’s important to note that Instagram had a Lite version before that, but it was killed last May to pave the way for this new version.
The technology behind Instagram Lite
The Facebook team has managed to integrate a lot of Instagram features into the Lite application, despite its small size. While the main app is sized at 30MB on download, the Lite app is only 2MB.
Instagram Lite does not have AR based stickers and effects to reduce size. The team also removed some transition animations to reduce loading time for stories and feeds.
It also uses some tools used to create Facebook Lite, such as SizeBot to control the size of files used in the project. To learn more about these tools, you can read our feature on how Facebook built its Lite app here.
[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 uses a different version of JPEG for compression so that the images load faster. In addition, it uses CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) to store certain assets to reduce loading time.
The next step for the Instagram Lite team is to roll out Dark Mode and Coil support worldwide.
You can download the app from here.
Did you know that we have a newsletter dedicated to consumer technologies? It’s called Plugged In – and you can subscribe to it here.
Published March 10, 2021 – 10:59 UTC
[ad_2]