Messenger Lite App Won't Be Available After This Date

Facebook Lite is a basic messaging app that misses out on several tools that the Facebook Messenger app offers, such as dark mode.

Social networking giant Meta is pulling the plug on Messenger Lite app soon. The Messenger Lite app will not be available for use after September, the media has reported. The Messenger Lite app is not available on the Google Play Store but it can be downloaded by previous ones, according to a report by 9to5Google. The app will go away after September 18.

Facebook Lite is a basic messaging app that misses out on several tools that the Facebook Messenger app offers, such as dark mode. Lite just lets users talk with people without any overboard design traits.

Facebook parent Meta has recently announced it is expanding testing for end-to-end encryption (E2EE) on Messenger.

"Starting today, millions more people’s chats on Messenger will be upgraded to stronger encryption standards as part of our ongoing end-to-end encryption (E2EE) testing. We remain on track to launch default E2EE for one-to-one friends and family chats on Messenger by the end of the year," Timothy Buck, Product Manager at Messenger, wrote in a blog post earlier this week.

With E2EE, the platform aims to enhance the security it already provides and give users additional confidence that their personal messages will remain private. Buck further mentioned that the platform is learning lessons from the WhatsApp engineering team on how to deliver messages on a huge scale and at high speed in an E2EE environment.

"A valuable lesson we’ve learned is it needs to be scalable and reliable, and be as simple and lightweight as possible," he added.

Also, streamlining the complexity of Messenger creates a better outcome, particularly for people who have low connectivity. In order to develop E2EE, the platform had to rebuild over 100 features in a client-centric way. To recall, last month, the company had introduced real-time avatar calls for Messenger.

This feature will be helpful when users don't want to show their real faces during video calls and want a third option between camera-off and camera-on.

During a company-wide meeting in June, Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta's vice president of AI, had said that the company would use its image generation model to allow Messenger users make stickers based on text prompts.