14 DAY TRIAL // In an upcoming update for smartphone owners, Facebook this week plans to roll out improvements that will make its widely-used Messenger app the fastest out there in terms of end-to-end latency.
The news comes straight from Facebook’s Product Manager Lexy Franklin, who reveals in an interview that one of the social network’s goals is to make Messenger the best service of its kind.
“The fastest and most reliable mobile messaging product”
Franklin tells TechCrunch that “There are tons of things we’re thinking about so we can create cool experience,” but that the company is currently focused on one aspect more crucial than anyone would have guessed: speed.
“What were really want is Messenger to feel like the fastest and most reliable mobile messaging product” Franklin says. “We’ve done a lot of work on performance on the backend, reducing end-to-end latency…to improve efficiency on all device types.”
You might not know it, but what you want most out of a messaging client is speed, according to another Facebook staffer. Former PayPal president David Marcus is now the head of Messenger at Facebook. In a conversation conducted with his interviewer on Facebook Messenger for iPhone, he points out that “while most people don’t think about it, they can feel it.”
What’s new in this update anyway?
For those of you asking that question, Facebook is not only reducing end-to-end latency, delivering your messages faster than ever, but also implementing a new receipt system – called FacePile – where you know exactly when a message has been delivered and read, by whom, and who in a group convo saw the message and who didn’t.
It’s not exactly a novelty, but Facebook’s implementation indeed seems to be the winning formula. Of course, your mileage will vary depending on a flurry of factors, including your network connection, your device model (some are faster than others at processing data), and even the state of your device.
Rolling out
The new Messenger is currently rolling out, so don’t panic if you don’t see it in your country’s App Store just yet. When it does arrive, you can download Facebook Messenger effortlessly through the supplied link herein.
Supported languages include English, Bokmål, Norwegian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, and Vietnamese. Your device will require iOS 7 to run the app.
