It was 2016, when Messenger Lite was announced as a solution for less powerful Android smartphones. We were in a period when there was a clear performance gap between the top range and the entry level, such as to motivate solutions of this kind, but in fact many relied on this version of the messaging app. The reason? Fast and streamlined, the Messenger Lite app offered everything you needed without missing your big sister. Of course it lacked features, such as a dark theme, but it was never slow and simply allowed you to communicate, while significantly reducing mobile data consumption. In some ways it was an ideal messaging app. It eventually became available for all phones, but now Meta is putting an end to Messenger Lite, and all this will materialize on September 18th.
In these hours more and more users report that opening the application appears a full-screen prompt with the words “use Messenger to continue chatting. Messenger Lite will no longer be available after September 18.” The message then reassures users that there will be no impact on conversation history and that everything can be restored with the use of Messenger in the classic version. The application is no longer available on the Play Store for new users.
Now the race to the last chip is much less felt in the mobile field and in fact we can say that the era of “lite” applications is coming to an end, since even the entry level now have enough power to run more or less any content of the Play Store. In the case of Google, Android Go remains as an exponent of the “lite” solutions, here we talk about an OS, but even in this case it may not be too long before Google decides to follow the same path.